She repented and said, ‘So it is.’ She said, ‘Yes, darling, the midwife put them in a box, and threw them into the water.’
Then he kindled the furnace, and cast both his mother and also the midwife into the furnace. And he burnt them; and so they made atonement. He gathered all the kings together, for joy that he had found his children. Away I came, the tale have told.
And a very poor tale it is, most clearly defective; we never, for instance, hear what becomes of the mother. Non-Gypsy versions of this story are very numerous and very widely spread, almost as widely spread [[72]]as the Gypsies. We have them from Iceland, Brittany, Brazil, Catalonia, Sicily, Italy, Lorraine, Germany, Tyrol, Transylvania, Hungary, Servia, Roumania, Albania, Syria, White Russia, the Caucasus, Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Bengal, as well as in Dolopathos (c. 1180) and Straparola. Special studies of this story have been made by Cosquin (vol. i. p. lxiii. and p. 190), and W. A. Clouston in his Variants and Analogues of the Tales in vol. iii. of Sir R. F. Burton’s Supplemental Arabian Nights (1887), pp. 617–648. Reference may also be made to Grimm, No. 96, ‘The Three Little Birds’; Wratislaw’s, No. 23, ‘The Wonderful Lads’; Grenville-Murray’s Doine; or, Songs and Legends of Roumania (1854), pp. 106–110; Denton’s Serbian Folklore, p. 238; Hahn, i. 272; ii. 40, 287, 293; ‘The Boy with the Moon on his Forehead,’ in the Rev. Lal Behari Day’s Folk-tales of Bengal (No. 19, p. 236); and ‘The Boy who had a Moon on his Forehead and a Star on his Chin,’ in Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales (No. 20, p. 119; cf. also, No. 2, pp. 7 and 245). ‘Chandra’s Vengeance’ in Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days (No. 22, p. 225), offers some curious analogies. There the heroine is born with two golden anklets on her ankles, ‘dazzling to look at like the sun.’ She is put in a golden box, floated down the river, saved by a fisherman, etc. Cosquin acutely remarks that in the original story the king, of course, marries the three sisters, and the two elder, jealous, are the prime workers of the mischief.
Yet a third Gypsy version, a Slovak one, is furnished by Dr. von Sowa. It is plainly corrupt and imperfect:—
No. 19.—The Two Children
Somewhere there was a hunter’s son, a soldier; and there was also a shoemaker’s daughter. She had a dream that if he took her to wife, and if she fell pregnant by him, she would bring forth twins—the boy with a golden star upon his breast, and the girl with a golden star upon the brow. And he presently took her to wife. And she was poor, that shoemaker’s daughter; and he was rich. So his parents did not like her for a daughter-in-law. She became with child to him; and he went off to serve as a soldier. Within a year she brought forth. When that befell, she had twins exactly as she had said. She bore a boy and a girl; the boy had a golden star upon his breast, and the girl had a golden star upon her brow. But his parents threw the twins into diamond chests, wrote a label for each of them, and put it in the chest. Then they let them swim away down the Vah river.[3] [[73]]
Then my God so ordered it, that there were two fishers, catching fish. They saw those chests come swimming down the river; they laid hold of both of them. When they had done so, they opened the chests, and there were the children alive, and on each was the label with writing. The fishers took them up, and went straight to the church to baptize them.
So those children lived to their eighth year, and went already to school. And the fishers had also children of their own, and used to beat them, those foundlings. He, the boy, was called Jankos; and she, Marishka.
And Marishka said to Jankos, ‘Let us go, Jankos mine, somewhere into the world.’