VI. _The Pretty Stranger_ is a native variant of _Judith and Holofernes_.
VII. A "Just So Story," a myth to explain the ways of animals. The cauldron of Medea, which destroyed the wrong old person, and did not rejuvenate him, is introduced. "All the stories have been told," all the world over.
VIII. _The Disobedient Daughter who Married a Skull._--This is most original; though all our ballads and tales about the pretty girl who is carried to the land of the dead by her lover's ghost (Bürger's _Lenore_) have the same fundamental idea. Then comes in the common moral, the Reward of Courtesy, as in Perrault's _Les Fées_. But the machinery of the Nigerian romance leads up to the Return of Proserpine from the Dead in a truly fanciful way.
IX. _The King who Married the Cock's Daughter_ is Æsop's man who married the woman that had been a cat. As Adia unen pecks at the corn, the other lady caught and ate a mouse.
[Footnote 1: See the Platonic dialogue, Minos, 315-6, and Athamas in Roscher's _Lexikon_.]
X. _The Woman, the Ape, and the Child._--This tale illustrates Egbo juridicature very powerfully, and is told to account for Nigerian marriage law.
XI. _The Fish and the Leopard's Wife._--Another "Just So Story."
XII. _The Bat._--Another explanation of the nocturnal habits of the bat. The tortoise appears as the wisest of things, like the hare in North America, Brer Rabbit, the Bushman Mantis insect, and so on.
XIII., XIV., XV. All of these are explanatory "Just So Stories."
XVI. _Why the Sun and Moon live in the Sky._--Sun and Moon, in savage myth, lived on earth at first, but the Nigerian explanation of their retreat to the sky is, as far as I know, without parallel elsewhere.
XIX. Quite an original myth of Thunder and Lightning: much below the divine dignity of such myths elsewhere. Thunder is not the Voice of Zeus or of Baiame the Father (Australian), but of an old sheep! The gods have not made the Nigerians poetical.
XXI. _The Cock who caused a Fight_ illustrates private war and justice among the natives, and shows the Egbos refusing to admit the principle of a fine in atonement for an offence.
XXII. _The Affair of the Hippopotamus and of the Tortoise._--A very curious variant of the _Whuppitie Stoorie_, or Tom-Tit-Tot story, depending on the power conferred by learning the secret name of an opponent. These secret names are conferred at Australian ceremonies. Any amount of the learning about secret names is easily accessible.