So they live long, happy and contented. This version from the Abruzzi so closely resembles the story of Sidi Nu’mán that we should perhaps be justified in concluding it to have been directly derived from Galland’s Nights, in the absence of any Venetian version, which might well have been imported independently from the East; but however this may be, the story in Galland bears unquestionable internal evidence that it is a genuine Arabian narrative, having nothing peculiarly European in its details. A somewhat similar story is quite familiar to me, but I cannot at present call to mind whether it occurs in a Persian collection or in The Nights, in which the woman going out when she thinks her husband asleep, the latter follows her to a hut at some distance which she enters, and peeping into the hut, he sees a hideous black give her a severe beating for not coming sooner, while she pleads that she could not venture to quit the house until her husband was sound asleep. The two carouse together, and by-and-by the black going outside for a purpose, the husband strikes off his head with his sword and then conceals himself close by. The woman, after waiting some time, goes out to see what is detaining her paramour, and finding his headless body, she moans over it in great sorrow, and then taking the corpse on her back carries it away and throws it into the river. Her husband hastens home before her, and so she suspects nothing. Some days after, when she refuses to do some light work because of her physical weakness, her husband can no longer control himself, and tells her that she had strength enough to carry on her back the body of her black paramour, and so on.[156] The ghoul-wife of Arabian tales, who eats little or nothing at home, has her counterpart in the rákshasí of Indian fictions, who secretly devours antelopes etc. There are many parallels in The Nights and other Asiatic story-books to the incident of Sidi Nu’mán being changed back into his proper form, the most noteworthy being perhaps the case of the Second Calender in the shape of a monkey, or ape, whom the princess, an adept in white magic, at once recognises as a man and veils her face, as does the young woman in the case of Sidi Nu’mán: but while the Calender is restored to his own form, the princess, alas! perishes in her encounter with the genie who had transformed him.—In most of the Arabian tales of magical transformations of men and women into beasts the victims are ultimately restored to their natural forms, but in the Indian romance of the princes Somasekhara and Chitrasekhara, a wicked king named Ugrabáhu is permanently changed by some water taken from a magic fountain into a monkey and sold to a beggar, who compels him to perform tricks in public for his benefit. Heywood, in his “History of Women” (Book viii.), cites some curious European stories of men being transformed into donkeys by eating a certain kind of cheese.