The legends of the Panjâb

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PEEFAOE.
XXI
brought to life, lost, metamorphosed and disguised, it must be
sometimes difiBcult for his friends and relatives to recognize
him, and so proofs of identity become indispensable.
These are
such as might be looked for, riugs of sorts, wounds, scars,
necklaces, kerchiefs, bracelets, caps, &o., and also occasionally
the correct recollection of former life and surroundings. The
idea is varied into signs of the coming hero which the actual
hero of the tales fulfils, as in the case of Raj^ EasaM whose
heel-ropes tie up and whose sword kills the ogres unbidden,
whose arrows pierce seven frying-pans and seven ogres placed
one behind the other, and shoot the golden cup off the challenge
standard, and into whose skirt fall the enchanted mangoes :
of which marvels are signs prophesied of the true Rasalu.
We have now done with the essentials of the stories and have
only some of the more important incidental matters to discuss.
Of these we cannot pass over ordeals. Though not common
in the collections under discussion they are only too common
in folklore generally, especially in that unhappy and cruel form
of it,—the finding and punishment of witches. In the Legends
Sila Dai passes through
all
two ordeals to prove her chastity, the
ordinary one of fire by bathing in boiling oil, and a curious one
of throwing a certain total with dice previously fixed on. Under
her other name of Chandni, or Moonlight, in the Rasalii Legend,
she performs a sheer impossibility with the same object, by
drawing water from a well in a pitcher of nnburnt clay by a
rope of a single strand. Marriages, of course, occurin every tale,
and sometimes considerable trouble is taken, as in the Niwal
Dai Legend, to show that, although the bride was carried away
by force, she was still regularly married in the orthodox way
nevertheless they are oftener irregular. The sleeping beauty
who probably, in Indian folklore at any rate, represents the raped
bride, or at best a stolen girl of the superior sort, is nearly always
married to the hero without any ceremony, and sometimes it
stated that the marriage meant merely an exchange of garlands,
recalling the gandharva-vivdha, or marriage by mutual consent
peculiar to the military class iu the classical days. In all
modern folktales there is another survival of a by-gone custom
is