"I don't want another; give me my very water-pot," she says.
Thereupon, being unable to escape from this woman, having said,
"For the debt of the elephant let the water-pot be substituted,"
the man who owned the elephant went away.
Tom-tom Beater. North-western Province.
A variant related by a Potter is nearly similar, except that both
persons instituted lawsuits for the recovery of the elephant and the
waterpot. The judge who tried the cases was the celebrated Mariyada
Raman, termed by the narrator "Mariyaddurame," a word which suggests
the name Amir Abd ur-Rahman.
There is also a Chinese variant, given in Chinese Nights'
Entertainments (A. M. Fielde), p. 111, in which a dishonest old woman
lent a newly-married girl her cat, in order to kill the mice. The
cat ran home, and the woman then applied for its return, praised
its excellence, and estimated its value at two hundred ounces of
silver. The girl discovered that her father-in-law had once lent the
woman an old wooden ladle, and when the old woman called again about
the cat she reminded her of it, and demanded its return. The cases
were taken before a magistrate. The girl claimed that the ladle was
made from a branch which fell down from the moon, and never diminished
the food, oil, or money from which anything was taken by means of it;
and she asserted that her father-in-law had refused an offer of three
thousand ounces of silver for it. The magistrate decided that the
two claims balanced each other.