Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/56

 The beginning of the Venetian variant is as follows: A king has a son who never laughs. To make him laugh the king digs a hole in his garden and fills it with oil, thinking that the people who come to draw this oil may make his son laugh. The device does not succeed until the oil gets very low, and an old woman, in attempting to draw it, tumbles into the hole. Then the king’s son laughs, and the old woman threatens that he shall never be happy until he has won the love of the three oranges. Now we know for certain, from internal evidence and from comparison with other folk-lore stories, that the Slovenian version of the Three Citrons begins at the end of November or the beginning of December; the Venetian variant proves beyond doubt that the goat in is Capricornus and not Aries. The prince, or princess, therefore, who does not laugh, is, as regards this idiosyncrasy, the gloomy month of November; Listopad, the fall of the leaf in Slav, the month of the Novene, the commemoration of the dead; in Central Europe of small-pox and other epidemics, of Morana, goddess of pestilence, of fog and gloom everywhere, and of expiring life. Capricornus the goat, which has the faculty of sticking things together, and which makes nature laugh, is therefore the first winter frost with a bright clear sky, that occurs at the beginning of December or the end of November. And how closely the popular imagination has kept to fact in the allegory is shewn in the following. In the Basket of Flowers (Venetian) the story finishes with the making of the princess laugh, and she marries an old man, because the story finishes within the limits of the old year. In George and his Goat, on the contrary, we have the three boon companions—that is to say, besides Capricornus, Aquarius, Sagittarius and Pisces—in other words, the story is carried on to the eve of the new year, and includes the triumph of spring. The princess, therefore, is imagined as ultimately marrying the youthful hero.

The story of L’omo morto, The Dead Man (Venetian), is the second half of The Three Citrons, modified by being told as a city story.

A poor sempstress runs away to find her fortune, and comes to an empty and enchanted palace. Here she finds dinner prepared, and is served by mysterious hands. She wanders over the palace, and in one room finds a dead man, with a placard at his feet announcing that if any one will watch by him a year, three months, and a week, he will come to life and marry her. She watches a year. Towards the end of the three months she hears from the canal below the balcony (the scene, observe, has contracted to Venice), voices from a gondola announcing Moorish slaves for sale. Being weary of solitude she buys one. At the beginning of the last week, she tells this Moorish girl to watch by the dead man while she sleeps for three days. On the third day the Moorish girl is to awake her. Instead of this, the slave lets her sleep on, and thus supplants her. The dead man wakes, sees the slave-girl watching, embraces and marries her. Ultimately, as in The Three Citrons, etc., but by a different chain of circumstances, the fraud is discovered, and the slave punished by being burnt alive. The story forms, therefore, one of the large family of stories that have sprouted from the last week’s events of the primitive annual solar or epic fairy story. The Lorely legend, the Lady of Shalott, The Troll-hatten legend, The Miraculous Hair (Serbian), The Death of Dido (Virgil), Medea and the Golden Fleece, The Dead Man (Venetian), the second half of The Three Citrons, the second half of The Love of the Three Oranges (Venetian)—and no doubt there are many other variants and derivatives—have