The king bounded forth; he looked at the handkerchief: it is his! it bears his name.
‘So, then, it is thou who art so clever?’
‘Yes, father, it is I.’
The king is very joyful; so are his sons and the queen, and the wife of this fool—all are filled with joy. Well, they made the wedding over again, and they lived together with the help of the good, golden God.
Cf. Ralston’s ‘Princess Helena the Fair’ (Afanasief, from Kursk Government), pp. 256–9; and Dasent’s ‘Princess on the Glass Hill’ (Pop. Tales from the Norse), pp. 89–103. The latter half, however, closely resembles the latter half of Dasent’s ‘The Widow’s Son’ (ib. pp. 400–404), as also that of Gonzenbach’s Sicilian story, ‘Von Paperarello,’ No. 67 (ii. 67), whose opening suggests our No. 9, ‘The Mother’s Chastisement.’ Matthew Wood’s Welsh-Gypsy story, ‘The Dragon’ (No. 61), offers analogies. There Jack gets (1) black horse and black clothes, (2) white horse and white clothes, (3) red horse and red clothes. The Polish-Gypsy story is strikingly identical with ‘The Monkey Prince’ in Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales, No. 10, p. 41.
No. 46.—Tale of a Girl who was sold to the Devil, and of her Brother
Once upon a time there lived a countryman and his old wife; he had three daughters, but he was very poor. One [[162]]day he and his young daughter went into the forest to gather mushrooms. And there he met with a great lord. The old peasant bared his head, and, frightened at the sight of the nobleman, said apologetically, ‘I am not chopping your honour’s wood with my hatchet, I am only gathering what is lying on the ground.’
‘I would willingly give thee all this forest,’ replies the nobleman; and he then asks the peasant if that is his wife who is with him.
‘No, my lord, she is my daughter.’