Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/535

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From Prätorius's Wünschelruthe, pp. 148, 149, we have often heard the boast founded on the bridegroom's bright farthing told as a joke. The question, "Did you also go to the wedding?" and the answer to it is added from oral tradition. Such jests are often used as conclusions to the stories when they fit them.

From the Schwalm district in Hesse. It is in the main the story of the Two Brothers (No. 60), but with a distinctive beginning, which links it with the story of the Fisherman and his Wife, No. 19. There is another story in Sommer, p. 113, from Thuringia. The notes to No. 60 belong to this also. The marvellous birth, and the complete resemblance of the brothers, appear in this story also. The knife which, in No. 60, is stuck in the tree as a token, is here a lily, as in the story of the Three Little Birds, No. 96. Compare the notes on that story. But we find a similar belief and custom in an Indian popular song. Shortly after his marriage, the husband has to leave his beautiful young wife. He plants a Kewra (spikenard, lavender) in the garden, and bids her observe it closely, and as long as it is green and full of bloom all will be well with him, but if it wither and die, he will have met with some misfortune. See Broughton's Selections from the Popular Poetry of the Hindoos (London, 1814), p. 107. Also in the Persian Touti Nameh (Iken, No. 4), the wife gives her husband a wreath of flowers to take away with him, and as long as it is fresh she has remained faithful to him, but if it withers she has begun to be untrue.

[In Straparola's Enchanted Hind, when Cannelora is departing, his friend Fonzo asks him for a token of his love. He sticks his dagger in the ground and a fountain rises up from the place, which he tells him, will by the state of its water always indicate the conditions of his life; and plunging his sword into the ground, he causes a myrtle to shoot up which will always do the same by the appearance of its leaves and foliage. Keightley's Popular Fictions.—]

Mr. Max Müller says (Chips from a German Workshop), "There is in the popular traditions of Central America, the story of the two brothers, who, starting on their dangerous journey to the land of Xilalba, where their father had perished, plant each a cane in the middle of their grandmother's house, that she may know by its flourishing or withering whether they are alive or dead. When a Maori war-party is to start, the priests set up sticks in the ground to represent the warriors, and he whose stick is blown down is to fall in the battle. In British Guiana, when young children are