The resemblance which this North German tale bears to the first part of “Ali Baba” is striking, and is certainly not merely fortuitous; the fundamental outline of the latter is readily recognisable in the legend of the Dummburg, notwithstanding differences in the details. In both the hero is a poor woodcutter, or faggot-maker; for the band of robbers a monk is substituted in the German legend, and for the “open, sesame” and “shut, sesame,” we have “little door, shut,” and “little door, open.” In both the borrowing of a corn-measure is the cause of the secret being revealed—in the one case, to Kasim, the greedy brother of Ali Baba, and in the other, to a miserly old hunks; the fate of the latter and the disappearance of all the treasure are essentially German touches. The subsequent incidents of the tale of Ali Baba, in which the main interest of the narrative is concentrated;—Ali Baba’s carrying off the four quarters of his brother’s body and having them sewed together; the artifices by which the slave-girl checkmates the robber-chief and his followers in their attempts to discover the man who had learned the secret of the treasure-cave—her marking all the doors in the street and her pouring boiling oil on the robbers concealed in the oil-skins in the courtyard;—these incidents seem to have been adapted, or imitated, from some version of the world-wide story of the Robbery of the Royal Treasury, as told by Herodotus, of Rhampsinitus, King of Egypt, in which the hero performs a series of similar exploits to recover the headless body of his brother and at the same time escape detection. Moreover, the conclusion of the tale of Ali Baba, where we are told he lived in comfort and happiness on the wealth concealed in the robbers’ cave, and “in after days he showed the hoard to his sons and his sons’ sons, and taught them how the door could be caused to open and shut”—this is near akin to the beginning of Herodotus’ legend of the royal treasury: the architect who built it left a stone loose, yet so nicely adjusted that it could not be discovered by any one not in the secret, by removing which he gained access to the royal stores of gold, and having taken what he wanted replaced the stone as before; on his deathbed he revealed the secret to his two sons as a legacy for their future maintenance. The discovery of Ali Baba’s being possessed of much money from some coins adhering to the bottom of the corn-measure is an incident of very frequent occurrence in popular fictions; for instance, in the Icelandic story of the Magic Quern that ground out gold or whatever its possessor desired (Powell and Magnússon’s collection, second series); in the Indian tale of the Six Brothers (Vernieux’s collection) and its Irish analogue, “Little Fairly”; in the modern Greek popular tale of the Man with Three Grapes (Le Grand’s French collection), and a host of other tales, both Western and Eastern. The fate of Ali Baba’s rich and