439 ([return])
[ This great class of tales is quite as widely extended in the north of Europe and Asia, as in the south. We meet with them in Siberia, and they are particularly common in Lapland I believe, too, that the Indian story of the Red Swan (referred to by Longfellow, Hiawatha xii.) is only a Swan Maiden legend in a rather modified form. As usual, we find a bizarre form of the Swan Maiden story among the Samoghitians of Lithuania. The Zemyne is a one eyed venomous snake, with black blood which cures all diseases and neutralises all magic. It is an enchanted maiden; and sometimes the skin has been stolen, and she has reamed a man. But if she recovers her skin, she resumes her snake-form, and bites and kills her husband and children. Many other strange things are related of the Zemyne (Veckenstedt, Mythen, Sagen, und Legenden der Zamaiten, ii., pp. 149-152).]
440 ([return])
[ About twenty pounds.]
441 ([return])
[ Spitta Bey (p. 27 note) suggests that this is a reminiscence of the ancient Egyptian idea of the Scarabæus which typifies life.]
442 ([return])
[ Southey, in his story of the Young Dragon, relates how Satan, disapproving of the rapid conversion of the inhabitants of Antioch to Christianity, laid an egg, and hatched out a dragon, which he sent to destroy the inhabitants. But a Pagan whose Christian daughter was devoted to the dragon by lot, stole the thumb from a relic (the hand of John the Baptist), as he pretended to kiss it, and cast it into the mouth of the dragon, and blew him up.]
443 ([return])
[ This is a variant of the Nose-Tree; I do not remember another in genuine Oriental literature (cf. Nights, x., app., p. 449).)]