He followed her into the palace, and said to her, ‘Good day to you, sister-in-law.’
‘Thanks,’ said she.
He caught her by the hand and dragged her out, and cut her all in pieces, and made three heaps of them; and two heaps he gave to the dogs, and they devoured them. And the rest of her he gathered into a single heap, and made a woman, and sprinkled her with the water of death, and she joined together; and sprinkled her with the water of life, and she arose.
‘Take her, brother; now you may live with her, for now she has no great strength. I will go home,’ said Dorohýj Kúpec.
And home he went.
This Gypsy story is absolutely identical with the widespread Russian one of ‘The Blind Man and the Cripple’ (Ralston, pp. 240–256). The Russian version as a whole is fuller and more perfect; yet neither from it, nor, seemingly, from any of its variants, can the Gypsy tale be derived. The opening of the latter comes much closer to that of Hahn’s story from Syra (ii. 267), a variant of the Turkish-Gypsy story of ‘The Dead Man’s Gratitude’ (No. 1), and surely itself of Gypsy origin. Here a king has an only son, and puts him to school; and the vizier, sent in quest of another lad, buys a beautiful Gypsy boy with a voice like a nightingale’s. He, too, is put to school, and proves the better scholar of the two.
In Ralston, as in Hahn, ii. 268, the prince falls in love through a [[95]]portrait (cf. supra, p. 4). In Ralston Princess Anna the Fair propounds a riddle, as in the Turkish-Gypsy story of ‘The Riddle’ (No. 3), where, too, she consults her book (cf. Ralston, p. 242). In Ralston there is no quarrel, and no cutting off of head; nothing also of the heroic sword. The squeezing by the servants is wanting in the Russian tale, but the sleeping with the bride occurs in a variant, and Ralston cites a striking parallel from the Nibelungenlied. The comrade in Ralston, after his feet are cut off, falls in with a blind hero; the devil—a late survival of the mediæval incubus—is represented by a Baba Yaga; and the prince is made a cowherd (but a swineherd in two of the variants). The finale in Ralston is extremely poor—best in the Ryazan variant, where the comrade beats the enchantress-queen with red-hot bars until he has driven out of her all her magic strength, ‘leaving her only one woman’s strength, and that a very poor one.’ In the winged cart we seem to get a forecast of the tricycle.
No. 25.—The Hen that laid Diamonds
There was a poor man, and he had three sons. And the youngest found six kreutzers, and said, ‘Take, father, these six kreutzers, and go into the town and buy something.’ And the old man went into the town and bought a hen, and brought it home; and the hen laid a diamond egg. And he put it in the window, and it shone like a candle. And in the morning the old man arose and said, ‘Wife, I will go into the town with this egg.’ And he went into the town, and went to a merchant. ‘Buy this egg.’
‘What do you want for it?’