Page:Crane Italian Popular Tales.djvu/78

40 crown and ordered splendid clothes and carriages. When he reached the palace, he did not go to the kitchen, but before the bride and groom could say "yes," "Stop!" said Salvatore. He took the apple and said: "Who gave me this?" "I did," replied the wife of the oldest brother. "And this?" showing the pomegranate. "I, my brother-in-law," said the wife of the second brother. Then he took out the crown. "Who gave me that?" "I, my husband," said the young girl whom they were marrying. And at once she married Salvatore, "for," said she, "he freed me from the magician."

The bridegroom was fooled and had to go away, and the astonished silversmith fell on his knees, begging for pity and mercy.13

In some of the versions of the above story, the hero, after he is abandoned by his brothers in the cistern or cave, is borne into the upper world by an eagle. The rapacious bird on the journey demands from the young man flesh from time to time. At last the stock of flesh with which he had provided himself is exhausted and he is obliged to cut off and give the eagle a piece of his own flesh. In one version (Pitrè, ii. p. 208) he gives the eagle his leg; and when the journey is concluded the bird casts it up, and the hero attaches it again to his body, and becomes as sound as ever.14

The class of stories in which the brother is killed and his death made known by a musical instrument fashioned from his body is sufficiently illustrated by a short Neapolitan story (Imbriani, Pomiglianesi, p. 195) entitled:

There was once a king who had three sons. His eyes were diseased, and he called in a physician who said that to cure them he needed a feather of the griffin. Then the king said to his sons: "He who finds this feather for me shall have my crown." The sons set out in search of it.