Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/480

398

My father did eat me, And yet I'm still here, Kiwitt, kiwitt."

The story is likewise told in the Pfalz with another beginning; the stepmother one day sends the two children into the wood to seek strawberries, and the one who comes home first is to have an apple. Then the little boy ties the little girl to a tree and comes back first, but the mother will not give him anything until he has brought his little sister home. The story is common in Hesse, but is seldom told so circumstantially, the only addition that we derive from thence is that the little sister strings together the bones on a red silken thread. The verse runs,

In a Swabian story, otherwise incomplete, Meier, No. 2, we find,

There is a passage in Goethe's Faust, p. 225, which our story will help to explain, and which the poet unquestionably took from ancient oral tradition.

The story is indigenous in the south of France, in Languedoc and Provence, and its details do not differ from the German one. The bird sings,

ma marâtre, pique pâtre, m'a fait bouillir et rebouillir.