Now this tale, or the first half of it, is but a Yorkshire variant of
one spread throughout Europe. The opening of the twenty-ninth story
of the collection of the Brothers Grimm, and entitled The Devil with
the Three Golden Hairs, is exactly the same, and in their Notes they
give references to many similar European folk-tales. The story is
found in Modern Greece (Von Hahn, No. XX.), and it is, therefore,
possible that the story of King Coustans is the adaptation of a Greek
folk-tale for the purposes of a Folk Etymology. But the letter, "On
delivery, please kill bearer," is scarcely likely to have occurred
twice to the popular imagination, and one is almost brought to the
conclusion that the romance before us was itself either directly or
indirectly the source of all the European Folk-tales in which the
letter "To kill bearer" occurs. And as we have before traced the
Romance back to Constantinople, one is further tempted to trace back
the Letter itself to a reminiscence of Homer's [Greek text which
cannot be reproduced].

I have said above that no Greek original of any of these Romances has
hitherto been discovered. But in the case of King Coustans we can at
any rate get within appreciable distance of it. As recently as 1895
a learned Teuton, Dr. Ernst Kuhn, pointed out, appropriately enough
in the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, the existence of an Ethiopic and of
an Arabic version of the legend. He found in one of Mr. Quaritch's
catalogues a description of an illuminated Ethiopic MS., once
belonging to King Theodore of Magdala fame, which from the account
given of several of the illustrations he was enabled to identify as
the story of "The Man born to be King." His name in the Ethiopic
version is Thalassion, or Ethiopic words to that effect, and the
Greek provenance of the story is thereby established. Dr. Kuhn was