Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/118

96 her bed, and lies on them. "Ah, ah, my son," she cries, "I'm dying. My bones are rattling around." (It is a lie: it is the dry wafers that rattle.) The son asks,—"Mother, what do you crave?" The mother replies,—"Son, I have heard that if you go and bring me the Water-melon of Immortality, for me to eat, I shall recover; if you don't bring it I shall die." The son rises, and goes.

He goes until he reaches the house of an old woman. The old woman asks,—"Son, where are you going?" "I am going to get my mother the Water-melon of Immortality, little mother," he replies. "Ho, my son," she says, "the old woman is deceiving you." "No, I will go and bring it," he affirmed.

The old woman answers,—"If you will go, come let me give you some advice. You go along, and there will be forty devils on one side of the road, and fifty devils on the other. The mother of the forty devils sits at home, kneading bread. If you are able to suck her breast before she sees you, you will be safe, but, if you do not, she will eat you up even if you were to escape a day's journey away from her."

The young man carries out the old woman's instructions. When the she-devil sees him, what then? "May the one who instructed you have her neck broken," she exclaimed. "You have succeeded. If you had not, you would have made me a fine feast!" Then she says,—"Come, let me put you into a chest, so that the devils won't find you and eat you wlien they return this evening." So she puts him into a chest.

In the evening the devils come, and immediately they cry,—"O mother, we bring home wolves and wild beasts to eat together, twelve months out of every year. Now, lo! we smell the smell of a man. You have eaten a man. Why didn't you leave a bit of his bones for us?"

"You come from roaming over mountain and valley, and the smell of man comes from you," the mother replies. "It is not so," they answer.

Then the mother says,—"Behold, the son of my mother's sister has come." And the devils say,—"Mother, if it is your cousin, fetch him out; we won't eat him; we want to visit with him too." The mother fetches the young fellow out of the chest, and the