My breath smells heavy and strong,
And if you kiss my lily-white lips
Your time will not be long.’
235 f. Add: Gaspé, Les anciens Canadiens, Québec, 1877, I, 220 ff.; cited by Sébillot, Annuaire des Traditions populaires, 1887, p. 38 ff..
236. A 5, etc. So Nigra, ‘La Sposa morta,’ p. 122, No 17, D 12: ‘Mia buca morta l’à odur di terra, ch’a l’era, viva, di roze e fiur.’
Little-Russian tale, Trudy, II, 416, No 122. A girl who is inconsolable for the death of her mother is advised to hide herself in the church after vespers on Thursday of the first week in Lent, and does so. At midnight the bells ring, and a dead priest performs the service for a congregation all of whom are dead. Among them is the girl’s godmother, who bids her begone before her mother remarks her. But the mother has already seen her daughter, and calls out, You here too? Weep no more for me. My coffin and my grave are filled with your tears; wretched it is to bathe in them! (W. W.) After this the mother’s behavior is not quite what we should expect. Cf. the tale in Gaspé, just cited.
79. The Wife of Usher’s Well.
II, 238.
C
‘The Widow-Woman,’ Shropshire Folk-Lore, edited by Charlotte Sophia Burne, 1883–86, p. 541; “taken down by Mr Hubert Smith, 24th March, 1883, from the recitation of an elderly fisherman at Bridgworth, who could neither read nor write, and had learnt it some forty years before from his grandmother in Corve Dale.”