Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/183

Rh oven, and when her fuel was done put in one after another the merchants' bales, and finally the merchant himself. So there was an end of the ogres.

The three girls now went on taking as many donkey-loads of treasure as they wished from the cave. They got so rich that they built a big house and bought a vast deal of property. They had for a neighbour a rich and wicked woman; when she saw how rich the three poor girls were become, she grew very anxious and longed to know where all this wealth came from. One day they sent to borrow her corn-measure (snich). Before sending it she rubbed honey on the bottom of it, and when it was returned there was a gold coin sticking to it. She came at once and asked them what they had been measuring. "Only a little corn our uncle sent us." But when she showed them the coin they were obliged to confess and tell her the whole story. She sent off her husband to the rock, and made one of the girls go with him. After he had been taken once or twice by the girl he went one day by himself; but God did not love him, and as he was coming out the rock shut upon him and crushed him. When he did not appear at home he was found by the girl. The neighbour now married a second husband; but he met with the same fate, and so a third. She then went to work to get the girls' husbands into her power, and succeeded so well that they left their wives and, taking all the treasure, went to live with her; and the three girls were as poor as ever.

One day the eldest went to confess her sins; and on the way back she met the devil. He said: "Where are you going? Will you be my servant? I have a beautiful house." "Is it far?" "No, we'll soon be there." She consented; and he took her to a cave—"Ach Karakiz"—and there gave her a leg of rotten meat and told her to eat it before his return. Before he went out, he found out from her all about her sisters and where they lived.

The poor girl could not eat the bone, but hid it in the ashes;