Page:Polish Fairy Tales - M. A. Biggs.djvu/156

96 a mortal wound, and breaking the sleep of death. These three waters always appear in stories, where this incident is used.

This story is rather freely translated, and much shortened from the original. There is much pious reflection, too long for insertion. The conversation between the prince and the sorcerer-miller is somewhat changed as much of it seemed rather irrelevant to the chief interest of the story, and lacking in pithiness.

The story of a supernatural maiden, compelled by the theft of her wings to remain temporarily as a mortal with a mortal husband, has its counterpart in many lands. The oldest perhaps is a Persian story, related in Keightly's "Fairy Mythology," of a Peri, who being thus entrapped, lives several years as an ordinary woman; but accidently finding her wings again, puts them on, and deserts her mortal husband and children, remarking as she does so: "I loved you well enough, while we remained together; but I love my former husband better" and so vanishes away to Peristan.

The parallel legend of "Little Sealskin" will readily occur to memory.