The seventh of Lal Behari Day’s “Folk-Tales of Bengal” opens as follows: Once on a time there reigned a king who had seven queens. He was very sad, for the seven queens were all barren. A holy mendicant, however, one day told the king that in a certain forest there grew a tree, on a branch of which hung seven mangoes; if the king himself plucked those mangoes and gave one to each of the queens they would all become mothers. So the king went to the forest, plucked the seven mangoes that grew upon one branch, and gave a mango to each of the queens to eat. In a short time the king’s heart was filled with joy, as he heard that the seven queens were pregnant.—In Miss Stokes’ “Indian Fairy Tales,” p. 91, Rájá Barbál receives from an ascetic 160 _lichí_ fruits, one of which he is to give to each of his 160 wives, who would have each a son.—Similar instances occur in Steel and Temple’s “Wide Awake Stories”, from the Panjáb and Kashmír, pp. 47 and 290, and in Natésa Sástrí’s “Dravidian Nights’ Entertainments” (a translation of the Tamil romance entitled “Madanakámarájankadai”), pp. 55, 56.—Among biblical instances of women having offspring after being long barren are: Sarah, the wife of Abraham (Gen. ch. xv. 2–4, xxi. 1, 2); Rachel, the wife of Jacob (Gen. ch. xxx., 1, 22, 23); and Elisabeth, the wife of Zacharias, the high-priest, who were the parents of John the Baptist (Luke, ch. i.). Whether children be a “blessing,” notwithstanding all that has been said and sung about the exquisite joys of paternity and maternity, is perhaps doubtful, generally speaking: one thing is certain, that many an honest fellow has had too much cause to “wonder why the devil he got an heir!”[154] Although no version or variant of the story of Khudadad and his Brothers has yet been found besides the one in the Turkish collection “Al-Faráj ba’d al-Shiddah,” yet the elements of which it is composed occur in many European and Asiatic tales. As we have in Galland a story of sisters who envied their cadette, so, by way of justice to the “fair sex,” we have likewise this tale of envious brothers, which is a favourite theme of popular fictions, only in the story of Khudadad, the brothers were not at first aware of the hero’s kinship to them, though they had been informed of it when they most ungratefully cut and slashed him with their swords as he lay asleep by the side of his beauteous bride the Princess of Daryabár.