Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/223

 Rh however, she disobeys and satisfies the giant's thirst. The effect of the water is to release the monster from his bonds. The treacherous heroine plots with him to persuade her brother to leave his three animals at home the next time he goes hunting; and on his leaving them the giant locks them up in the Forbidden Chamber and pursues the hero. He has almost fordone him when his beasts, hearing his voice singing a magic song that summons them to his aid, dash out of the chamber, rescue their master, and devour his persecutor.

Other versions of the story amplify it much, some bringing the heroine's treachery into even higher relief. In one a brother is warned against his sister, and counselled to put her to death. Rather than do this he takes her to live with him in the desert, where ho overcomes and puts to death a band of brigands, takes possession of their treasure, and brings his sister to dwell in their cave. She hears a voice, and opening a room in the cavern finds one of the brigands, a negro, not dead. The faithless girl heals his wounds, becomes his paramour, and by his advice sends her brother for the grapes of Paradise, and afterwards for the Water of Life to cure her feigned illness. When he returns successful the negro cuts off his head and hews him in pieces, which he puts in a sack, loads an ass with it, and drives the animal away. Two faithful lion cubs, however, bring the ass to the hero's wife, a princess whom he has in the meantime healed and married; and she with the Water of Life restores him. This is an Arab story. Some Sclavonic tales present nearly the same scries of incidents, without the Forbidden Chamber. The faithless sister's paramour is a revived brigand who presents himself in some other way; and the faithful animals are enchanted men. Another tale, also Sclavonic, presents the perfidious heroine as the hero's mother. It elaborates the incidents at greater length; but its chief point of interest is its approximation of the central scene to that of the type we shall next consider. The palace of which the hero and his mother take possession has been a habitation of dragons, all of which the hero at first supposes himself to have killed. There is, however, one