Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/240

232 Of a different character is the heroine of a legend of the County Clare. The Queen of the Country of Perpetual Youth, she persuades Ossian to accompany her to her own land and to share her throne. But a broad flat stone in one part of the palace garden is pointed out to him on which he may not stand under penalty of the heaviest misfortune. One day he disobeys and finds himself in full view of his native land, which he had forgotten since he had been in the Country of Perpetual Youth. He sees it oppressed, and begs permission to return. The queen, finding all dissuasion vain, permits him to return for a single day, and gives him a jet-black steed. From this steed he is not to dismount, nor is he on any account to let the bridle go. Forgetting so simple a direction he quits his seat to assist a peasant. The spell is thus broken: the three times thrice seven years he has dwelt in the Country of Perpetual Youth fall upon him when his feet touch earth again. He becomes an old man, feeble and helpless, and the horse that should have borne him back to happiness disappears.

This is the weird story of Olger the Dane, which in one form or another is so popular all over the west of Europe; but to follow it would lead me too far from my present subject. Keeping within the limits I have prescribed for myself, I will just mention one other version of the tale last cited. It is an Algonquin legend, bearing a strange, I had almost said a suspicious, likeness to our Aryan myths. We are told that a man, coming to a lonely lake in the mountains, found maidens bathing; he picked up their clothes and ran away. They pursued him, and on one of them coming up he caught and wedded her. Subsequently he procured in a similar way one of his wife's sisters, and wedded her also. The two wives desert him. Lying down together at night, they wish for stars for husbands, and when they awake they find themselves in another world, each wedded to the star she had chosen, who appears in the form of a man. Their new husbands forbid them to lift a certain large flat stone; true to their instincts, they disobey, and find beneath a hole, through which they look down to the earth, and are seized with a desire to return to it.