Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/71

Rh the prophecy of the skull would come true. When the child grew up to be a youth, the Tsar sent him away from home into the world and said to him: “Do not stop at any place until you find the spot where two evils are conflicting with one another.” As the youth went through the world, he came to the spot where now stands Constantinople, and there he saw a hawthorn around which a snake had wound its coils. And the snake bit the thorn and the thorn was pricking the snake. Then the lad thought to himself: “These are the two evils,” and he went round about that spot to examine it. And as, in thus going round, he came again near to the hawthorn, he stopped and said: “Here I must stop.” No sooner had he said this, than, looking back, he saw that right away from the thorn and all the way wherever he had passed, a wall had grown up behind him. But from the spot where he stood to that thorn they say there is no wall in Constantinople unto this day. Had he not looked back and had he not said: “Here I must stop,” the wall behind him would have grown up as far as the thorn. Later on he became Tsar there, and wrested the Empire from his grandfather.

Fr. S. Kraus relates two Serbian popular tales from the neighbourhood of the Majevica Mountain in Bosnia, which likewise contain references to virgin birth.

The first of these tales is called: Kako se rodio Car Konstantin (How Tsar Constantine was Born), and it is of the same type as the above-mentioned tale. It runs as follows:

Once upon a time, as the King of the Jews was returning from the hunt, he came upon the skull of a man and he pushed it with his foot. “Don’t kick me,” said the skull, “for I will judge you.” Then the King took up the skull