Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/236

 228 story of The Hermit's Foundling with the Golden Hair the boy appears as a king's daughter's bastard brought up by a hermit; and in a Norse variant he is simply a widow's son seeking employment. In the latter story there are four forbidden rooms, wherein the ogre foolishly stores up the magical articles which are to impede his pursuit of his disobedient servant and end in his death. Beside these the hero finds a large black horse with a trough of burning embers at his head and a basket of hay at his tail, and compassionately reverses them. The horse then speaks, telling him to wash in one of the rooms in a kettle which boils without any fire under it, and to fetch from another room a suit of armour, sword, and saddle. The boy had already tried the virtue of the kettle by dipping in it his finger, which he had drawn out gilded, thereby causing the detection of his curiosity and its punishment by his master. Bathing in it now he finds himself not only endowed with splendour, but also with strength to bear the armour. The Roumanian tale transforms the ogre into three fairies, whose service the hero enters after his foster-father the hermit's death. These fairies go away, leaving him the customary prohibition, which he of course disobeys, and discovers in the room an empty bath and a chest containing three bundles of clothes. On a second absence the fairies charge him to sound a horn three times if he hear any noise in the Forbidden Chamber. But his magical horse, the hermit's posthumous gift, directs him instead to enter the room and plunge into the bath. This bath fills only once in a century; and the noise of its filling is the signal for which the hero was to wait. The bath turns his hair to gold; he steals the clothes from the chest and rides off, with his masters in full pursuit, I need not follow his adventures farther, as they scarcely differ from the later incidents of the two stories already analysed.

VII.

There is another story in which the fatal curiosity of Bluebeard's wife plays an important part. I mean that of The Third Royal