Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/297



HEN I collected the five Chilian tales, one of which, The Good Serpent, you have already printed in your valuable magazine [ante. vol. i. pp. 221-226], I was in hopes that there would be found in them something belonging to American legend or mythology, even if it might be only some extraneous element mixed up with what was in the main undoubtedly old world and even Aryan. But since I have been in Spain I find that The Good Serpent, The Black Woman and the Turtle-dove, and Maria, the Cinder-maiden, are Spanish, and show only such slender differences of addition and omission as may be expected to be found in tales, the tellers of which have so long been isolated from the old continent.

Don Antonio Machado y Alvarez has printed in the Spanish paper La America the Spanish version of The Black Woman and the Turtle-dove, with his valuable annotations, which I would gladly lend to any of your collaborateurs who read Spanish. This gentleman considers that the very identity of these Chilian tales (coming from a part of Chili whither no European element has been introduced of late years) with those current in the south of Spain, is of itself a claim to their preservation in the condition in which they were found.

Don Machado y Alvarez, whom you will recognize as the great Spanish authority on folk-lore, and who has done me the favour to write me at length respecting them, recognizes the three tales above cited as variants of old friends, but has not as yet been able to trace the immediate origin (as a tale in its Chilian form) of Prince Jalma,