Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/323

Rh penetrate. The heroine then requires of her lover the restoration of her father to his throne. This is accomplished after a short war; but the old king has become insane. By the heroine's incessant care and devotion he is at the end of a year restored to his senses, and only then she consents to be married.

II.

In the next type the adventures of the elder daughters are dropped, the heroine tells her father that she loves him like salt, and, after adventures more or less relevant to the main plot, she compels him to admit his injustice towards her. The simplest form of the tale is found in Miss Busk's collection of The Folk-Lore of Rome, and is entitled "The Value of Salt." Here a king, after many tests, asks his three daughters separately how much they love him. The eldest answers "As much as the bread we eat"; the second, "As much as wine"; the youngest, "As much as salt." The king, angered with the reply of the last, shuts her up in a wing of the palace by herself, resolved never to see her again. But she finds means to speak to the cook, whom she induces one day to serve up to the king a dinner without salt. The king cannot eat anything, and in this way he learns to understand the value of salt, and how great was the love of his youngest child. Similarly, in a Swabian anecdote, a fragment of a folk-tale, given by Meier, a king makes the usual enquiry of his daughter—only one is mentioned—and is told in reply that she loves him like salt. He is offended, but does not expel the heroine. Soon after, at a feast, she contrives that the dishes shall all be sent up unseasoned with salt, and so convinces her father of the wisdom of her answer.

Most of the variants of this type, however, take the heroine through a series of adventures before she is able to prove herself right. Probably the greater number follow the stories already cited from Agenais and Corsica in grafting a version of Peau d'Âne upon the trunk of