Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/216

 208 endeavour to make their way into the heroine's home by force, but are caught, and brought to justice. In the Swabian tale there is a distinct prohibition to open the Forbidden Chamber, and an egg is given to the heroine, with an injunction not to put it out of her hand. She eludes the test by laying it in a basket before gratifying her curiosity. Having forged a letter from her father, sending for her on account of his illness, she persuades the robber chief to take her home, and carries her sisters' heads secretly with her. Once at home, she denounces the robber chief, and he is tried, condemned, and executed. The judge, anxious to secure the rest of the band, requests her to guide the officers to the robbers' fastness. She loses them in the wood, and is caught by the robbers; but, while they are gathering wood and resin to burn her to death, the chief's mother, taking pity on her, releases her from the tree to which they have bound her. She overtakes a carter, whose waggon is laden with barrel-hoops, but he refuses to help her. She fares no better with a second, who is carrying barrels; but the third hides her beneath the undermost of a load of water-troughs. The robbers pursue, and all but discover her. It is needless to add that, after they are put to death, the story ends with her marriage to the beneficent carter.

The episode of the three carters seems an amplification of the meeting with the robbers in the Sicilian tale. It is found in several tales under slightly varying forms, and is apparently based on the same idea as that which represents the ogre as unwittingly carrying the heroine home in a chest supposed to contain dirty clothes or food. A variant of the "Bluebeard" type, given by Legrand from Sakellarios' Cyprian collection, relates it in the following way:—The heroine slips out of window to escape her husband, and overtakes a carter, who refuses her aid. She runs and comes up with a camel-driver, whose beast is laden with bales of cotton. He hides her in one of these; and her husband, though he pierces the bale with a red-hot spit, and wounds her foot, fails to find her. The camel-driver takes her to the palace, where she marries the king's son. The heroine of a corresponding Tuscan tale causes herself to be nailed up in a