‘In my country now is the princess well.’
‘And in your second country what is the news?’
‘In my country now is much water.’
‘And in your third country what is the news?’
‘There now is no such dew as they rubbed the eyes with.’
Then those three crows came to those two lads, and then there those crows say, ‘We will tear these two lads.’ And they tore and devoured them. And then those three crows flew away, and flew into the sky. [[117]]
With its then’s and its that’s, a very imperfect, schoolboyish version. It does not tell how the hero cured the princess, or that his two brothers were blinded. Non-Gypsy variants of this widespread story are Grimm’s ‘The Two Travellers’ (No. 107, ii. 81), Cosquin’s ‘Les Deux Soldats de 1689’ (No. 7, i. 84), Denton’s Servian story of ‘Justice or Injustice’ (p. 83), Wratislaw’s ‘Right always remains Right’ (Lusatian, No. 14, p. 92), Hahn’s ‘Gilt Recht oder Unrecht’ (No. 30, i. 209), and others cited by Clouston (i. 249–261) from Norway, Portugal, the Kabyles, the Kirghiz, Arabia, Persia, and India. The borrowing the bushel occurs in the ‘Big Peter and Little Peter’ group of stories (cf. Clouston, i. 120, ii. 241–278; and Campbell’s Santal Folk-tales, pp. 30, 100), of which we have a Welsh-Gypsy version (No. 68), and which have a certain affinity with ‘The Rich and the Poor Brother.’ ‘Prince Half-a-Son’ in F. A. Steel’s Indian Wide-awake Stories, p. 290, is plainly analogous. On p. 277 we have ‘a great rich wedding that lasted seven years and seven days.’
No. 32.—The Enchanted City
There was a poor lad, and he served seven years, and could not earn anything. And he went into the world, and went into a city, and spent the night there, and lay down under a wall, and slept. In that wall there was a hole, and he awoke, and looked through the hole, and saw a candle. And he crept through the hole, and went into a palace. There was a great city, and there was an emperor in the city; and the emperor was dead, and also the empress was dead. And the emperor had a daughter, and she commanded the army. And that city was excommunicated, and the people were turned into stone. So the lad went into the palace of the emperor, and there in the palace all were turned into stone. And he marvelled what this might be, that the men were like men, but yet were all turned into stone.