costs too much, according to the prophetic etymology of the folk.

The only historic personage with whom this Coustant can be identified
is Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine the Great and the
husband of St. Helena, to whom legend ascribes the discovery of the
Holy Rood. But the Coustans of our story never lived or ruled on
land or sea, and his predecessor, Muselinus, is altogether unknown to
Byzantine annals, while their interlaced history reads more like a
page of the Arabian Nights than of Gibbon.

But such a legend could scarcely have arisen elsewhere than at
Constantinople. It is one of those fables that the disinherited folk
have at all times invented to solace themselves for their
disinherison. The sudden and fated rise of one of the folk to the
heights of power occurs sufficiently often to afford material for the
day dreams of ambitious youth. There is even a popular tendency to
attribute a lowly origin to all favourites of fortune, as witness the
legends that have grown up about the early careers of Beckett,
Whittington, Wolsey, none of whom was as ill-born as popular
tradition asserts. Yet such legends invariably grow up in the
country of their heroes, which is the only one sufficiently
interested in their career, so far as the common people are
concerned. Hence the very nature of our story would cause us to
locate its origin on the banks of the Bosphorus.

But once originated in this manner, there is no limit to the travels
it may take. Curiously enough, the very legend before us in all its
details has found a home among the English peasantry. The Rev. S.
Baring-Gould collected in Yorkshire a story which he contributed to
Henderson's Folklore of the Northern Counties, and entitled The Fish