He returned with his wife to his father’s house. His father was very glad to see him come back with his wife; he gave them something to eat and drink, and he said to his son, ‘Hearken to me now, my child. We are old now, I and my wife; thou must stay beside me.’
And he answered him, ‘It is well, my father; if thou sendest me not away, I will dwell with thee.’
This story of the prig of a little nobleman—a blend of George Washington and little Lord Fauntleroy—is somewhat incoherent, and presents a good many obvious lacunæ. Thus Kopernicki remarks, ‘the narrator had omitted to mention the feather in the fourth paragraph from the end. In many Polish and Russniak tales one meets with a bird’s feather or a horse-hair possessing the magical power of making anybody immediately appear. One has only to burn this feather a little, and then to smell it. In this Gypsy tale, therefore, the hero’s brothers-in-law had evidently given him such a feather at the time of his departure. But the narrator had forgotten to mention this though he remembered the feather when he reached that point at which the hero had need of it to summon his brothers-in-law to kill the dragon.’ Such a feather, however, is by no means exclusively Slavonic; it occurs in our Roumanian-Gypsy story (No. 10, p. 38), and in a Turkish-Gypsy one (Paspati, p. 523): ‘He gave the old man a feather, and he said to the old man, “Take it and carry it to your daughter, and if she puts it in the fire I will come.” ’ Cf. too, Hahn, i. 93; Carnoy and Nicolaides’ [[168]]Traditions de L’Asie Mineure (1889), p. 140; Legrand’s Contes Grecs (1881), pp. 69, 71, 72, 73 (hero burns bee’s wing with a cigar), 89; and the Arabian Nights (‘Conclusion of the Story of the Ladies of Baghdad’):—‘She gave me a lock of her hair, and said, “When thou desirest my presence, burn a few of these hairs, and I will be with thee quickly.” ’ Precisely the same idea occurs frequently in F. A. Steel’s Wide-awake Stories from the Panjab and Kashmir: e.g. ‘Only take this hair out of my beard; and if you should get into trouble, just burn it in the fire. I’ll come to your aid’ (p. 13; cf. also pp. 32, 34, 413–14, and Knowles’s Folk-tales of Kashmir, pp. 3, 12).
I can offer no exact variant of this story, but many analogies suggest themselves, e.g. in No. 5, ‘The Three Princesses and the Unclean Spirit,’ in No. 44, ‘The Three Dragons,’ and in ‘The Weaver’s Son and the Giant of the White Hill’ (Curtin’s Myths and Folklore of Ireland, p. 64), where also one gets the wool, fin, and feather. For the invisible cloak, cf. Clouston, i. 72, etc. In Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales, No. 22, p. 156, the hero finds four fakirs quarrelling for the possession of a travelling bed, a Fortunatus bag, a water-supplying stone bowl, and a stick and rope that bind and lay on. He shoots four arrows, and whilst the fakirs are searching for the fourth one, decamps with these objects (so, too, Knowles’s Folk-tales of Kashmir, p. 87). An invisible cap occurs in F. A. Steel’s Wide-awake Stories, p. 37.
No. 47.—The Brigands and the Miller’s Daughter
There was once a miller who had a beautiful daughter. Noble lords paid their court to her, but she cared not for them. She was wooed by high officials, but neither to them did she listen. At length three brigands, disguised as noblemen, came to the miller’s house. They ordered something to eat and drink. The miller, being invited to the repast, drank willingly, but his daughter would not take anything, for she despised them. These three brigands returned to their leader, and said to him, ‘What shall we do with this girl? She cares for nobody; she refuses to eat and drink.’
Then twelve of them set out for the miller’s. It was Sunday. The miller was from home; he had gone to a baptism. The daughter was all alone in the house. The brigands arrived. They made a hole in the store-room by which to enter. Having heard them doing this, she took a sword and placed herself beside the hole made by the brigands. She was, however, very much frightened. One of the brigands came and thrust his head half through the [[169]]hole. She took the sword; she cut off the brigand’s head, and drew him into the store-room. Another brigand essayed to enter; she cut off his head and drew him inside. The ten other brigands asked their two comrades what they were about.
‘They are helping me to carry away the money here, which I am not able to lift alone.’[1]
Then a third brigand came forward; the girl cut off his head and pulled him in. A fourth came, and his head too was cut off, and his body drawn in. The fifth brigand endeavoured to enter; she killed him in the same way, and, having cut off his head, dragged him inside.
‘What are all of you about there?’ asked the seven brigands who remained outside.