Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/247

Rh aroused by the disappearance of food; and, watching at night, she sees her husband feeding the elf, and washing and combing him. The next day she finds the key of the box, and takes the elf out; but while she is combing him the evil spirit snatches him away from her. She finds her hands turned red from contact with the elf, and cannot wash the stain off. Her husband returns without any game, sees the red stain on her hands, and thus discovers what has happened. "He seized his bow to beat her; when she saw him seize his bow to beat her she ran down to the river and jumped in, to escape death at his hands, though it should be by drowning. But as she fell into the water she became a sheldrake duck. And to this day the marks of the red stain are to be seen on her feet and feathers." I may remark in passing that we might be disposed to exclaim with Antonio, "The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning," when we find a water fairy thus in danger of drowning and transformed for safety into a duck, if we had not the Swan-Maiden myth of the Old World to interpret the inconsistency. But what I want to call attention to is that this narrative, while preserving most of the essential features of the full-grown Aryan Bluebeard story, has yet two remarkable differences. In Europe the husband keeps the corpses of his victims in a secret chamber to conceal his guilt. It is understood that once that chamber door is thrown open by one who is permitted to betray what is within the guilty being's life is not worth a day's purchase, for offended society will vindicate itself upon him either by lynch-law or the ordinary course of justice. It is thus necessary for him to keep the chamber door locked against all intruders. The Algonquin tale replaces this gruesome mystery by the elf in the box. On the preservation of this elf the hunter's luck depends; and when he has been robbed of it through his wife's indiscretion his success in the chase is gone. He returns home for the explanation, and finds it in the guilty stains upon his wife's hands. Manifestly the elf is his fetish, and in the cage containing it we have a more primitive form of the Forbidden Chamber. The incident in this shape is specially characteristic of savage life. As with advancing civilisation the reasoning which has moulded it thus becomes obsolete we may expect that the incident itself will undergo a change into a form more appropriate to the