Page:The Grateful Dead.djvu/126

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110
The Grateful Dead.

recognized at the court by dropping his ring in a cup of tea, which the princess gives him to drink. It will be evident that the two tales are nearly related.

Last, but not least interesting of the versions in which the child appears, is the Factor's Garland or Turkey Factor, which must have been almost as well known in England at one time as the form of the story in Jack the Giant-Killer. It has no very remarkable features in its outline. A young Englishman, while acting as a factor in Turkey, pays fifty pounds to have the body of a Christian buried. A little later he pays one hundred pounds to ransom a beautiful Christian slave, and takes her back to his home, where he makes her his housekeeper. Later he sets out again, and is told by the woman to wear a silk waistcoat that she has embroidered, when he comes to the court whither he is bound. The work is recognized by her father, the emperor, and the factor sent back to fetch her. While returning with the princess, he is pushed overboard in his sleep by the captain, but swims to an island, whence he is rescued by an old man in a canoe, who bargains with him for his first-born son when three (or thirty) months old. The hero is recognized at court and marries the princess, while the captain dies by suicide. In two (or three) years the old man returns, just when the couple's son is three (or thirty) months old, and demands the child. On the hero's yielding, he explains that he is the ghost, and disappears.

Like Gaelic[1] and Simrock VIII.—the latter just discussed—this version makes the hero undergo his early adventures in Turkey. Indeed, the similarity to Gaelic throughout is very notable, far more so than in the case of Basque II.[2] The only point in which it differs materially is the division of property, which in Gaelic concerns the wife and the three children, in the Factor's

  1. See pp. 85 f.
  2. See pp. 105 f.