The touching trait of the creature, which runs to its master or mistress after saving the child, with the charming confidence and pride which any animal shows when it knows that it deserves praise, appears in nearly all the versions. Prince Llewellyn’s greyhound goes out to meet him “all bloody and _wagging his tail_.” The ichneumon ran joyously to meet its mistress, and the cat, in the Persian version, came up to its master “rubbing against his legs.” In the Persian tale the child’s mother dies at its birth, and it is stated that she was very fond of the cat, which made the man even more grieved that he had killed it.
In German folk-lore the story of the dog “Sultan” sounds as if it were invented by some happy-souled humorist who had the Llewellyn motive in his mind, but who wanted to tell a merry tale instead of a sad one. “Sultan” is so old that his master wishes to kill him, though much against the advice of his wife. So “Sultan” consults a wolf of his acquaintance, who proposes the stratagem of pretending that he is going to eat the good people’s child, while “Sultan” pretends to come up just at the nick of time to save it. The plan is carried out with complete success, and “Sultan” lives out his days surrounded by respect and gratitude.
There are several Eastern tales which are of the same family as Llewellyn’s hound, but in which the animal, instead of saving a child, confers some other benefit on its possessor. In a Persian fable a king kills his falcon because it spilled a cup of water which he is about to drink: of course, the water was really poisoned. A current folk-tale of Bengal makes a horse the victim of its devotion in preventing its master from drinking poisonous water.
Rather different is the following Chinese tale, which is to be found, told at more length, in Dr. Herbert H. Giles’s delightful book, “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio”:—
There was a man of Lu-ngan who had scraped together enough money to release his father from prison, where he was like to die of all the untold miseries of Chinese durance. He got on a mule and set out for the town where his father was languishing, taking the silver with him. When he was well on his way, he was much annoyed to see that a black dog which belonged to the family was following him; he tried in vain to make it go back. After riding on for some time, he got off the mule to rest and he took the opportunity for throwing a large stone at the dog, which ran away, but as soon as he was on the road again the dog trotted up and took hold of the mule’s tail, as if trying to stop it. The man beat it off with the whip, but it only ran round in front of the mule, and barked frantically so as to impede its progress. The man now reflected, “This is a very bad omen,” and he got fairly into a rage and beat the dog off with such violence that it did not come back. So he continued his journey without further incidents, but when he reached the city in the dark of the evening, what was not his despair on finding about half his money gone! He did not doubt that he must have dropped it on the way, and after passing a night of terrible distress he remembered, towards dawn, the strange way in which the dog behaved, and he began to think that there might be some connexion between this and the loss of his money. Directly the gates were open he retraced his steps along the road, though he hardly hoped to find any clue to his loss, as the route was traversed by many travellers. But at the spot where, on the previous day he dismounted from his mule to rest, he saw the dog stretched dead on the ground, its hair still moist with perspiration, and when he lifted up the body by one of its ears, he found his lost silver safely concealed underneath it! His gratitude was great, and he bought a coffin, in which he placed the dog and then buried it. The place is known as “the Grave of the Faithful Dog.”