Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/234

226 royal majesty has is not Mariquita. She is here; order her to do the wonders which her brothers spoke of." She then told all that the two wicked women had done with Mariquita on the way to the palace. The king, very wroth, took her indoors, made her wash her hands, kept the water, and the next day it had changed into a block of silver. He made her comb her hair, and the hair that fell off became golden threads. She laughed and fine pearls fell from her mouth.

The king acknowledged his mistake, and felt very sorry for having killed so unjustly the brothers; he married Mariquita, and ordained great royal feasts, and ordered Estefania and her mother to be broken on the wheel, quartered, afterwards to be burnt and their ashes cast to the winds.

After some time had passed, Mariquita had twin princes. Once when they were lying in the cradle, and their parents fondling them, the serpent came, and said, "Which should you like best to see, your sons dead, or your brothers alive?" They answered, "Our sons dead, since they are angels from heaven, and our brothers alive." The serpent cut the infants' throats, and led the parents to the place where the bodies of the two brothers lay embalmed, and they found them alive and well. The parents then felt very sorrowful, and went back to weep over their children; when they found them alive, and playing in the cradle. The serpent said to them, "I have now done all that I can do for you. I have no more business here, for I am an angel sent by God, and I am going back to heaven. Farewell!" The tale is finished.

NOTES, QUERIES, NOTICES, AND NEWS.

Bogle Hole.—"It was in the immediate vicinity of Bogle Hole that during one of my earliest visits I was told by a countryman of super-human appearances there, of the huntsman's dogs turning back from the pursuit of animals which were something more than what they seemed to be, and of a man who in trying to fly from a high crag was killed, as we might have supposed he would be; but my informant did not attribute his fate to want of skill in the means he had adopted for