Page:Crane Italian Popular Tales.djvu/90

52 me, and now I have come to save you from death." You can believe that they stayed to hear her story. They were married and have always been happy and still are.17

In the various stories thus far mentioned which involve the family relations, we have had examples of treachery on the part of brothers, ill-treatment of step-children, etc. It remains now to notice the trait of treachery on the part of sister or mother towards brother or son. The formula as gjven by Hahn (No. 19) is as follows: The hero, who is fleeing with his sister (or mother), overcomes a number of dragons or giants. The only survivor makes love to the sister (or mother), and causes her, for fear of discovery, to send her brother, in order to destroy him, on dangerous adventures, under the pretence of obtaining a cure for her illness. The hero survives the dangers, discovers the deception, and punishes the guilty ones. Traces of this formula are found in several Italian stories,18 but it constitutes only two entire stories: one in Pitrè (No. 71) the other in Comparetti (No. 54, "The Golden Hair," from Monferrato, Piedmont). The latter is in substance as follows: A king with three sons marries again in his old age. The youngest son falls in love with his step-mother and the jealous father tries to poison her. The son and wife flee together, and fall in with some robbers whom they kill, and set at liberty a princess who has the gift of curing blindness and other diseases. They afterward find a cave containing rooms and all the necessaries of life, but see no one. They spend the night there, and the next morning the youth goes hunting; and as soon as he has departed a giant appears and solicits the step-mother's love, saying that if she will marry him, she will always be healthy and never lose her youth. But first it will be necessary to remove from her step-son's head a golden hair, and then he will become so weak that he can be killed by a blow. She was unwilling at first, because he had saved her life, but finally yielded. First she tried to get rid of him by pretending to be ill, and sending him for some water from a fountain near which was a lion.