'Gangk, Ragenohrlin, gangk ran',
ich must gleichwol zum ersten dran
und wann er mich dan brecht umbs Leben,
So würd ir all die Flucht thun geben."
Three of them are painted on a house in Vienna, pointing their long spear at the hare, together with the somewhat altered inscription,
"Veitla, gang du voran,[1]
denn du hast Stiefel an,
dass er dich nit beissen kann."
See Falk's Tartarus and Elysium, 1806, No. 10. The History of the Seven Swabians has recently appeared, with ten lithographical illustrations, Stuttg. 1832, 4. Compare the old English poem, The Hunting of the Hare, Weber, 3. 277-290. There is also some similarity to this in the poem called Von drei stolzen Westphälingern, in an old Dutch popular book. They went forth and heard a bumble-bee humming, and thought it was the drums of the enemy which they heard, and began to fly. During their flight the one who was last stepped on a hop-pole which was lying in the way, and the point of it hit against the tip of his ear. Then he cried in a fright, "I surrender." When those who were running before him heard that, they also cried, "So do we! Quarter! Quarter!"
120.—The Three Apprentices.
From a story heard in Zwehrn and another current in the Leine district. In the latter the innkeeper buries the murdered man, but a friend of his comes and discovers his horse in the inn-stable, and his dog scratches under the eaves, where the murdered man, whose clothes it recognizes, is lying covered with earth, but with one arm out. There is a Swabian story in Meier, No. 64, and one from Holstein in Müllenhoff, No. 22. Another from the Hartz is in Pröhle's Märchen für die Jugend, No. 169. Bonaventure de Periers (d. 1544) wrote a collection of stories, probably from oral tradition, which first appeared in Paris in 1558, then with notes by de la Monnoge in 1568, and at other dates. In the edition which appeared in Amsterdam in 1735 (Contes et nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis, 3 vols. 8vo), in No. 22, 1. 229-232, De trois
- ↑
Veitla, go first, for thou wearest boots, so he cannot bite thee.
"Advance! advance! No turning back!"
'Tis mine to make the first attack,
But if my life he takes, straightway
You, one and all will run away."
