[143] There is a story (French, I think) of a king who overheard a poor man and his wife abusing Adam and Eve for their poverty. The king took them home, and entertained them. They had a grand feast of many covers every day, but there was always one, the largest of all, which they were forbidden to open. The wife soon persuaded her husband to do so, when a mouse ran out, and the king turned them out of doors. [144] This expression shows the late date of the present story, for no people uninfluenced by the modern Christian notion that all reasoning beings except men must be necessarily angels or devils, and therefore immortal, represent superhuman beings as immortal, with the exception of the gods, and not always even these. [145] See page 157. [146] The original title of this story is, "How an orphan made his fortune unexpectedly." Some commentators identify the keeper of the hounds with Othin. In the Scandinavian mythology the breaking loose of the monsters, the most terrible of whom is Garm, the watch-dog of Helheim, precedes the cataclysms of Ragnarök. [147] This is the usual condition attached to such gifts, as in the Swiss story of a chamois-hunter who received an inexhaustible cheese from a mountain-spirit. But in the case of the magic saddlebags of the Moor in the story of Joodar ( _Thousand and One Nights_ ), it was a condition that all the dishes should be put back empty. The Jews, too, were forbidden to leave anything over from the Passover Feast. [148] Or frog: the word is the same. [149] Either the extinct urus or the nearly extinct aurochs must be here intended. [150] Yolk-Carrie. [151] Compare pages 246 and 248. [152] The word translated "lout" means literally "filthy-nose." [153] In the _Kalevala_, Runo 33, Kullervo revenges himself in the same manner upon the wife of Ilmarinen, whom he has been serving as herd-boy, and who has treated him with great cruelty and harshness. [154] Titus.