Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/86

 enquires why; the heroine informs her, and shews her the dress. The queen desires to buy it; the heroine will only give it for a night with king Corvo; the queen, to get the robe, consents, and possets the king’s wine. Baulked of her desire, the heroine laments throughout the night. The same happens with the walnut; but the king’s confidential servant, who sleeps in the adjoining room, overhears the heroine lamenting, and informs the king. When the apple is opened, and the queen is bribed by the beautiful dress to concede a third night to the heroine, the king throws the possetted wine, unseen by the queen, under the table, and when the heroine sleeps with him the whole mystery is explained. A banquet is then announced, and the twelve neighbouring kings invited. At dessert, when the cloth is removed, each recounts his adventures, and last of all King Raven his. The end of the story is so quaint that I give it in full: “And now (says he) it’s my turn to speak; and I have to relate what happened to a king, a friend of mine. Well, you must know, that this king was, in person, as we others are, and in the presence of his parents, in the form of a raven; because his mother, while enceinte with him, was under a conjuration; and so to her eyes he was a raven. In his kingdom of so and so, he married, and told his young spouse not to divulge that he was a youth; and she confided it all—every bit, to a friend of hers. And so it happened to this king to scamper off all at once, and to go a long, long way into another city. There he married again, never dreaming that his first wife would go and find him in that city so far away. Instead of that, this first wife of his, to go and find him again, she has worn out three pairs of iron shoes, and she has passed through all sorts of hardships. And his second wife has had the courage to arrange that for three suits of clothes his first wife should sleep with him for three nights. If it had been anyone who had had the idea of murdering him, that there second wife would have let him be deprived of life for three suits of clothes. Now what would she deserve, this second wife?” And he turns to the oldest king present, and says to him: “Sacred majesty, he who is the oldest king of all we others here, let him say what this second wife would deserve.” He rises to his feet, this king, and he says: “She would deserve to be burnt in the middle of the piazza on a barrel of tar.” Then King Raven causes his second wife to come forth, and he says: “And burnt let her be; it is your own daughter.”

And so it was done; and this King Raven took with him the goose-girl, and they have renewed their marriage, and have always felt a world of love for one another.

Now this story is full of points of interest. In the first place it is obviously a form of the Three Citrons, and the three citrons were shewn by a comparison of the word haluze (a branch), and halusky (Slovenian for dumplings), to have come from the north through some Slavonian region north of Slavonia, and where haluze meant a branch; because in the north the Jack in the Bean Stalk legend speaks of branches but not of dumplings. In the Venetian variant a