strangled it, and the jinnee fell upon the ground a heap of black ashes.(382) In a modern Arabian tale a king marries an ogress, who puts out the eyes of the king’s forty wives. One of the blinded queens gives birth to a son whom she names Mohammed the Prudent. But the ogress queen hated him and compassed his death. So she sent him on an errand to the house of her kinsfolk the ogres. In the house of the ogres he saw some things hanging from the roof, and on asking a female slave what they were, she said, “That is the bottle which contains the life of my lady the queen, and the other bottle beside it contains the eyes of the queens whom my mistress blinded.” A little afterwards he spied a beetle and rose to kill it. “Don’t kill it,” cried the slave, “for that is my life.” But Mohammed the Prudent watched the beetle till it entered a chink in the wall; and when the female slave had fallen asleep, he killed the beetle in its hole, and so the slave died. Then Mohammed took down the two bottles and carried them home to his father’s palace. There he presented himself before the ogress queen and said, “See, I have your life in my hand, but I will not kill you till you have replaced the eyes which you took from the forty queens.” The ogress did as she was bid, and then Mohammed the Prudent said, “There, take your life.” But the bottle slipped from his hand and fell, the life of the ogress escaped from it, and she died.(383) (M110) A Basque story, which closely resembles some of the stories told among Aryan peoples, relates how a monster—a Body-without-Soul—detains a princess in captivity, and is questioned by her as to how he might be slain. With some reluctance he tells her, “You must kill a terrible wolf which is in the forest, and inside him is a fox, in the fox is a pigeon; this pigeon has an egg in his head, and whoever should strike me on the forehead with this egg would kill me.” The hero of the story, by name Malbrouk, has learned, in the usual way, the art of turning himself at will into a wolf, an ant, a hawk, or a dog, and on the strength of this accomplishment he kills the animals, one after the other, and extracts the precious egg from the pigeon’s head. When the wolf is killed, the monster feels it and says despondently, “I do not know if anything is going to happen to me. I am much afraid of it.” When the fox and the pigeon have been killed, he cries that it is all over with him, that they have taken the egg out of the pigeon, and that he knows not what is to become of him. Finally the princess strikes the monster on the forehead with the egg, and he falls a corpse.(384) In a Kabyle story an ogre declares that his fate is far away in an egg, which is in a pigeon, which is in a camel, which is in the sea. The hero procures the egg and crushes it between his hands, and the ogre dies.(385) In a Magyar folk-tale, an old witch detains a young prince called Ambrose in the bowels of the earth. At last she