[1] Kláka. ‘Claca,’ says Grenville Murray, ‘signifies a species of assembly very popular in Wallachia. If any family has some particular work to do on any particular account, they invite the neighbourhood to come and work for them. When the work is completed there is high glee, singing and dancing, and story-telling.’—Doine; or, Songs and Legends of Roumania (Lond. 1854), p. 109 n. [↑]
[2] In Wlislocki, p. 104 note, the devil has a duck’s foot. In F. A. Steel’s Indian Wide-awake Stories, p. 54, the hero detects a ghost by her feet being set on hind part before. [↑]
[3] On p. 110 Dr. Barbu Constantinescu gives a long and terrific formula for bewitching with the evil eye. [↑]
[4] The notion of a dead girl turning into a flower is very common in Indian folk-tales. Cf. Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales, pp. 145, 149, 244, 247, 248, 252, etc.; and Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days, No. 6, ‘Little Surya Bai,’ pp. 79–93. [↑]
[5] Dá pes pe sherésti, lit. gave, or threw, herself on her head. In Gypsy stories this undignified proceeding almost invariably precedes every transformation. Cf. [[17]]‘The Red King and the Witch,’ ‘The Snake who became the King’s Son-in-law,’ ‘Tropsyn,’ etc. [↑]
[6] For golden boy cf. Dr. Barbu Constantinescu’s own ‘The Golden Children,’ No. 18, also Hahn, ii. 293. The two apples seem to be birth-marks. [↑]
[7] For the bursting of monsters, cf. Dasent’s Tales from the Norse, pp. 27, 240; and Ralston, p. 130. [↑]
[8] Our queen’s great-great-great-grandfather, George I., was a firm believer in the vampire superstition (Horace Walpole’s Letters, vol. i. p. cix.). [↑]