Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/109

 passed into oblivion, and were doubly welcome, both for their novelty, and because, though the hearers, perhaps, only half-realized it, they were old friends with new faces. When in some angle of a breakwater the rolling breakers are repelled, the crests colliding with the advancing billows increase the confusion and hurly-burly, and heighten its wild extravagance. This is what has happened with our myths and fairy stories. The huge majestic billows of the past are subsiding, but the reflux from the last of their spent forces, crossing the subsiding wave-roll of western pagan fancy, has prolonged the semblance of its activity and galvanized its decay into a last flicker of youthful vitality.

In all the eight stories from the Czech, Lusatian, and Ungaro-Slovenian of which I am writing, the frost and snow element is intrinsic, and in some of them stronger than the climate of Bohemia and Hungary would seem to warrant. This is particularly the case with the Three Citrons and the Sun-horse, both of which have many points in common with Eastern fairy stories. Every one knows the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk; it is the variant of a fairy myth which extends from Alaska in North America to Serbia in the Balkan Peninsula, and to Great Britain in the North of Europe. That is to say, it covers probably nearly the whole of the Northern hemisphere. In the Alaska (Dogger-Indian) legend, Chepewa, the divine being, plants a stick which grows into a fir-tree. This was after the great flood. The stick rapidly grew into a fir which reached heaven. A squirrel ran up the tree, and Chepewa after it, and reached the stars and a broad table-land, where, laying a snare for the squirrel, he caught the sun. In the Siebenbürgen form of the legend a young shepherd comes to a tree, the branches of which form a kind of a ladder. After nine days’ climbing he arrives at a plateau on which is a palace, a forest, and a well, with copper-coloured water. He dips his hand in, which becomes copper-coloured also. He breaks off a branch, climbs other nine days, and reaches a similar plateau, palaces, and a silver well, dips in his hand, and it becomes silvered. He breaks off a branch, climbs other nine days, and arrives at a plateau with a castle and well of gold. He detaches a third branch, obtains admission to the castle, rides thrice round the hill of glass, and, touching the breast of the king’s daughter with the three branches, causes her to become his bride.

In the English variant the plant of a haricot-bean shows that the legend is a lunar one, the pea and haricot-bean being symbolical of the moon, perhaps from their crescent-shaped pods (cornetti in Italian), or because the scarlet-runner is a rapid-growing plant. In one of the Serbian legends the miraculous hair has disappeared, but the hero is conducted by a limping fox in return for kind treatment (the squirrel of the Dogger-Indian story), to a sort of starry underworld for the golden maiden, the golden maiden is only to be obtained in