Those she sets him are:—
“Thou must buy for me an acre of land
Between the salt ocean and the yellow sand.
“Thou must plough it over with a horse’s horn,
And sow it all over with one pepper corn.
“Thou must reap it too with a piece of leather,
And bind the sheaf with a peacock’s feather.”
“In all stories of this kind,” says Mr. Child, in his monumental work on English Ballads, “the person upon whom a task is imposed stands acquitted if another of no less difficulty is desired, which must be performed first.”
An early form of this story is preserved in the Gesta Romanorum. A king resolved not to marry a wife till he could find the cleverest of women. At length a poor maid was brought to him, and he made trial of her sagacity. He sent her a bit of linen three inches square, and promised to marry her, if out of it she could make him a shirt. She stipulated in reply that he should send her a vessel in which she could work. We have here only a mutilated fragment of the series of tasks set. In an old English ballad in the Pepysian library, an Elfin knight visits a pretty maid, and demands her in marriage.
“‘Thou must shape a sark to me