for her a beautiful and perfect (faultless, unimpeachable) skin. Indras, hearing her voice, passes over her with wheel, chariot, and rudder; by three efforts, he takes off her ugly skin. Apâlâ then appears in a beautiful one. In the skin thus stript off there was a bristle (çalyakaḥ); above, it had a hirsute appearance; below, it resembled the skin of a lizard.[4] The bristle or thorn upon the skin of Apâlâ is naturally suggestive of the hedgehog, the porcupine, the wild boar, and the bristly hog. The aurora, as the Vedic hymn sings, shines only at the sight of her husband; thus Apâlâ, of the ugly or the hog's skin, and Ghoshâ, the leprous maiden, become splendid and healthy by the grace of their husband. Thus Cinderella, or she who has a dress of the colour of ashes, or of a grey or dark colour, like the sky of night (in Russian stories Cinderella is called Cernushka, which means little black one, as well as little dirty one), appears exceedingly beautiful only when she finds herself in the prince's ball-room, or in church, in candlelight, and near the prince: the aurora is beautiful only when the sun is near. In the twenty-eighth story of the sixth book of _Afanassieff_, the maiden persecuted by her father and would-be seducer, who wishes to marry her, because he thinks her as beautiful as her mother (the evening aurora is as beautiful as the morning aurora), covers herself with a hog's skin, which she takes off only when she marries a young prince.[5] In another story of White Russia,[6] we have, instead, the son of a king persecuted by his father, who is constrained to quit his father's house with a cloak made of a pig's skin. In an unpublished story of the Monferrato, the contents of which Dr Ferraro has communicated to me, the girl persecuted by her step-mother is condemned to eat in one night an interminable number of apples; by means of two hog's bristles, she calls up a whole legion of pigs, who eat the apples in her stead. As to the rudder of Indras's chariot in the lower bosom of Apâlâ, it would seem to me to have a phallic signification. Indras may have cured Apâlâ by marrying her, as the Açvinâu, by means of a husband, cured the leprous Ghoshâ, who was growing old in her father's house. In the tenth story of the _Pentamerone_, the king of Roccaforte marries an old woman, believing he is espousing a young one. He throws her out of the window, but she is arrested in her fall by a tree, to which she clings; the fairies pass by, and make her young again, as well as beautiful and rich, and tie up her hair with a golden ribbon. The aged sister of the old woman who has grown young again (the night) goes to the barber, thinking that the same result may be attained simply by having her skin removed, and is flayed alive. For the myth of the two sisters, night and aurora, the black maiden and she who disguises herself in black, in grey, or the colour of ashes, consult also the _Pentamerone_, ii. 2. According to the Italian belief, the hog is dedicated to St Anthony, and a St Anthony is also celebrated as the protector of weddings, like the Scandinavian Thor, to whom the hog is sacred. The hog symbolises fat; and therefore, in the sixteenth Esthonian story, the hog is eaten at weddings. The companions of Odysseus, transformed by the meretricious enchantress Circe, with the help...