Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/222

 214 from her father by a lady who meets him in a wood. The heroine sees in the Forbidden Chamber only her mistress bathing, with two maidens near her reading a book. Her two sisters, whom her mistress had previously bought from her father, had been rash enough when taxed with their disobedience, at once to admit, and to repeat what they had been privileged to behold; and they had consequently suffered summary death at the hands of their outraged lady. Not so the heroine. Questioned as to what she has seen, she says "Nothing!" and stoutly persists in that denial. When driven out again from the lady's palace into the wood, she is found by a prince and married. After her second child has disappeared the prince resolves to put her away as insane and marry another. The clearer Italian sky has got rid of the shadows of witchcraft and ogrehood that overhang the German and Sclavonic tales. But the heroine is saved even from the milder suffering involved in repudiation and the imputation of madness, by the appearance of her former mistress. After having at this trying moment attempted and failed to extract an admission, she declares the heroine's innocence, restores her children, and adds that her persistence has redeemed her from a spell.

IV.

In all the foregoing tales the heroine, though guilty of curiosity and often deceit, is not treacherous, or if she is we readily pardon it, seeing the evil that has been practised upon her. In another group prevalent in the East she and the ogre have changed places. She is the faithless sister or mother whose curiosity leads to the discovery and release of the hero's mortal enemy, with whom she forms an intrigue and plots the hero's death. In the typical story, published in Roumanian Fairy Tales and Legends, two children, a boy and girl, are by the contrivance of their stepmother abandoned in a wood. The boy receives a cub each from a fox, a wolf, and a bear, in return for sparing their lives; and with his sister he takes possession of a certain palace. Opening a door in the palace he finds within a giant bound with three chains, who cries out for water. He bangs-to the door, which he afterwards forbids his sister to open. In his absence,