Page:The Grateful Dead.djvu/123

Rh horrible form. On condition of giving in a year and a day half of what he and his wife possess, he is taken to court by this being, where he is recognized by means of a gold chain, which the princess had given him. At the wedding feast, which takes place that day, the wife recounts a parable of how she has found the old key of a coffer just as a new one was ready, brings in Iouenn, and has the minister burned. At the end of a year and a day comes the ghost, and demands half of the child (the older one has died) that has been born to them. As the hero reluctantly proceeds to divide the child, the ghost stops him, praises his fidelity, and disappears.

It will be seen that this variant does not differ in essentials from those previously summarized, though its details exactly coincide with none of them. The order of events is normal, very like that of Lithuanian II., for example, yet it has marks of peculiarity. Chief among these are the events connected with the ransom of the lady and the parable by which she introduces her long lost husband to court. The first is a trait borrowed from the Perseus and Andromeda motive, the second is the same as the riddle in Jean de Calais IX How this latter feature should happen to appear in these two widely separated variants and nowhere else I am not wise enough to explain.

Simrock I. introduces still another complication in the way of compounds. A merchant's son on a journey secures proper burial for a black Turkish slave, thereby using all his money. His father is angry with him on his return. On his second voyage he ransoms a maiden and is cast off by his father when he reaches home. The young couple live for a time on the proceeds from the sale of the wife's handiwork, but after a little set off to the court of her father, who is a king. On the way