One night she was reminded in a dream that she had not yet recompensed the peasant who had hidden her in the straw. So next day she sent a boy to fetch this peasant. The boy went to the peasant’s house, and said to him, ‘Come to the miller’s daughter, who is asking for you.’
The peasant dressed himself, and went to the miller’s house. He entered. He stopped on the threshold and saluted the good God.[5] [[174]]
‘You remember hiding me in the straw, my good man?’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘Well, I have never given you anything,’ she said to him.
She went to the store-room, and brought four quarts of silver money to him. This poor peasant, quite delighted, accepted the money and took it in his hand. The miller’s daughter gave him something to eat and drink; and then he took his leave and went home with the good God.
We have two other Gypsy versions of this story—one from Hungary (Dr. Friedrich Müller), and the other from North Wales (Matthew Wood, ‘Laula’). The Hungarian opens:—‘Somewhere was, somewhere was not,[6] in the Seventy-seventh Land in a village a Hungarian;’ and may thereafter be summarised:—Of his three daughters two get married. The third at last has a sweetheart, who always comes to see her after midnight. Once she follows him to a cave in the forest, from which twelve robbers come out. She enters, comes on corpses, and hides behind cask. A lady is brought in; her hand is chopped off; the girl possesses herself of it and escapes home. The wedding is fixed. She tells soldiers, but not her father. At the wedding she relates a dream: ‘And, ye gentlemen, think not that I was really there, for I saw it merely in a dream.’ Soldiers come in just as she draws the hand from her bosom and flings it on the table. After which the story drifts off into a version of the Roumanian-Gypsy tale of ‘The Vampire’ (No. 5), a version summarised on p. 19.
The following epitome of ‘Laula’ is by Mr. Sampson:—Three young ladies live at a castle. A gentleman comes to visit them daily. They know not who he is or where he lives. He asks the youngest to accompany him home. She goes with him, eats, drinks, and returns. She asks his coachman his master’s name, ‘Laula.’ She thinks it a pretty name; her elder sister a bad one. Next evening she goes again. They eat, drink, and play cards. He leaves the room, and returns with a phial of blood. ‘Is your blood as red as this?’ She pretends that he is jesting; but he cuts off her finger, opens the window, and throws it to the big dog, afterwards killing her. The tale goes on, ‘Who got the finger? The elder sister got it’; and it then explains how she had followed the pair by the track of the horse’s feet, pacified the dog, and caught the finger (with ring on) thrown to him. She desires her father to issue invitations to a dinner. Every one comes and has to tell a tale or [[175]]sing a song. On Laula’s plate is placed nothing but this finger. When the elder sister tells her tale, he grows uneasy, and says he must go outside. He twice interrupts thus, but is restrained by the other gentlemen. She gives him away, and at the old father’s suggestion he is placed in a barrel filled with grease and burnt to death. [On which it is just worth noting that Lawlor was a Gypsy name in 1540.—MacRitchie’s Scottish Gypsies under the Stewarts (1894), pp. 37–39.]
Of non-Gypsy variants may be cited Grimm’s No. 40, ‘The Robber Bridegroom’; and Cosquin’s ‘La Fille du Meunier’ (another miller’s daughter), i. 178. In England we have ‘The Story of Mr. Fox’ (Halliwell’s Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales, 1849, p. 47, and Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales, pp. 148, 247), and ‘The Girl who got up the Tree’ (Addy’s Household Tales, 1895, p. 10). Shakespeare refers to the story in Much Ado about Nothing, I. i. 146. ‘Bopoluchi’ in F. A. Steel’s Indian Wide-awake Stories, pp. 73–8, should also be compared.