binds a sack of salt on the back of the youngest, and drives her forth into the forest. She is there found by an old woman, and taken as her gooseherd, and is provided with an old woman's skin as a disguise. After a while she is discovered by a nobleman's son as she washes at the well, and with the connivance of her mistress; but her father and mother have to come and fetch her, after confessing the wrong that has been done.
A Hindoo variant[1] brings the outcast princess through an entirely different series of events. She is carried out by her father's orders into the jungle, and there abandoned. God sends her food miraculously, and at length she arrives at a place in which lies a king's son dead, his body stuck full of needles. She pulls them out. When she has partly got through her task she buys a slave, whom she leaves to watch the body while she rests. The work is now all but completed, the needles in the prince's eyes only remaining. The slave pulls them out, in spite of the heroine's injunctions to the contrary, and the youth at once comes to life again. The slave pretends to have herself accomplished his deliverance, and he weds her instead of the heroine, who becomes degraded to slavery. The real facts, however, are ultimately made known to the prince by means of some puppets that come out of a "sun-jewel box," procured for the heroine by him. He accordingly puts the slave away and weds his true deliverer. She invites her father and mother to the wedding, and compels recognition of her real character as in the European tales. But it should be noticed that in most of the latter the heroine's identity is not disclosed to her father until he has made his confession under the belief that she is dead: whereas, in the story now under consideration, there is no attempt at concealment.
Among the Basques[2] a king's son proposes to marry one of the three daughters of another king. The latter king asks his daughters how much they love him; but none of their answers please him. The eldest says, "As much as I do my little finger; "the second," As much as my middle finger; "the youngest," As much as the bread loves the salt." The king, in a rage, orders the youngest to death; but the
- ↑ Maive Stokes, Indian Fairy Tales, Story No. 23, p. 164.
- ↑ Webster, Basque Legends, p. 165.
