Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/334

 326 relate their dreams. The following morning one of the maidens tells him that she has dreamed that in a few days she will change her condition, and that five kings, and among them her own father, will kiss her hand. This dream returns the next night, and on hearing it a second time the king orders her out to be put to death, directing that her little finger shall be brought to him in sign of the executioners' compliance. She is, of course, spared, but loses her finger. She enters a cave in the wood, and at length finds herself in a rich palace, inhabited alone by a parrot, whose voice only she hears through a closed door. After some days a fair youth appears for a moment, to give her the key of the room where the parrot dwells, and to tell her to open it and answer the parrot when it speaks. The bird compliments her in verse, and the heroine replies (also in verse) that she will make a head-dress of its rich feathers. The parrot forthwith is disenchanted into the youth who had just appeared to her. He marries her, and invites five kings to the wedding. Her father is among them, but she refuses to give him her hand to kiss, as she had done to the others; and this brings about the customary explanations. In the incident of the parrot as found in this variant, I think we may catch a glimpse of an earlier form of that of the dove in The Savage King. It is not that the episode is less complex, and leads with greater directness to the solution of the plot. Simplicity is not always a note of antiquity. But the union of human nature with that of the lower animals is more complete in the parrot than in the turkey or dove of the Italian narrator; and this union is known to be thoroughly in harmony with primitive thought. One of the first notions entertained by mankind, of which we have any record, was that all animals—nay, even trees, flowers, rocks, the heavenly bodies, and every object known to sense—were actuated by reason and feelings precisely analogous to our own. But this imputation of the characteristics of man to brutes and things inanimate is more than primitive: it is the perpetually recurring will-o'-the-wisp of our imagination. When man's essential distinction comes to be recognised by widening knowledge, the ideas of metempsychosis and afterwards of enchantment, grow up as a support for the conviction that still haunts us. In The Savage King episode the bird is a bird only, though of