The legends of the Panjâb

XVin
PEBFACE.
it peeps out only as a survival in a very interesting custom
(page ,50). When Eaja EasaW has won a bride from Kaja
Sirkap, he is given a new-born infant and a young maogotree
which is to flower in twelve years, and when it flowers
the girl is to be his wife. Here the tree is obviously intended
to be her life index. Lastly, the calumniated wife is a worldwide
incident, and in India she turns up in all sorts of shapes,
for subjection to calumny, as a viotifior the tales in the collections
now being examined, is extended to the hero and heroine,
a wife, a nurse, a sister-in-law, co-wives, and a husband, the
cause being always jealousy. The victims in the Punjab
Legends are the hero's elder brother in Eaja Easalil and the
hero's mother in Guril Gngga.
We now pass on to matters affecting the progress of a story.
All stories are worked on the same principles. You collect your
actors, start them in life, and then get them into difficulties
and out again; ' no mess no story' is an unconscious law that
guides story-tellers all over the world from the successful novelist
of the day to the old crone by the fireside. The Indian
tellers have their own methods of both getting their characters
into their troubles and out of them, and chief among these is the'
deus ex machina. He is sometimes a god, as his name implies,
but not often. In these Legends in the story of Sila Dai a god
only comes in once as the direct extricator from difficulty, and
then it is a most.stupendous one that has to be surmounted ; both
the heroes and the heroine are all dead together
and must be
brought to life if the story is to end happily, as it ought in
propriety to do, so Mahadeva is introduced for this purpose.
The gods appear again in the Legend of Niwal Dai, but it is
more as ordinary actors in the tale than in any marvellous capacity.
Oftenest the deus ex machina is a talking animal, showing
the way to fortune, warning of danger, explaining the situation,
aiding the actors in reward for services rendered, and performing
other feats necessary to the onward flow of the tale. In
these Legends the parrot is largely employed in this capacity
by ESja EasaM, but so also is a serpent, a hedgehog and a
cricket! In the other collections every conceivable animal is
all