and when she and her two sisters are led before him veiled and clad in other than their ordinary garb, he knows her at once by the loss of her toe. As it is told in Denmark the enchanted princess agrees with the king's son to wind a red silken thread around her little finger; and by this means he identifies her, though in the form of a little grey-haired, long-eared she-ass, and again of a wrinkled, toothless, palsied old woman, into which the sorceress, whose captive she is, changes her. In a Swedish story the damsel informs her lover that when the mermaid's daughters appear in various repulsive forms she will be changed into a little cat with her side burnt and one ear snipped. The Catalonian märchen of Joanescas represents the heroine as wanting a joint of her finger, from her lover having torn off some of her feathers by accident when he stole her robe. "Monk" Lewis in his "Journal of a West India Proprietor" gives an Ananci tale in which the heroine and her two sisters are changed into black cats: the two latter bore scarlet threads round their necks, the former a blue thread.[1] According to the Carmarthenshire saga, the lady is recognized by the strapping of her sandal.
In several of the stories just cited, and many of their congeners, the maiden forewarns her suitor how she will be disguised, or by what marks she will be known. Sometimes, however, she makes a sign to him on the spot. The Lady of the Van Pool only thrusts her foot forward that he may notice her shoe-tie; but Cekanka in a Bohemian tale is bold enough to wink at him. In a Russian variant of the Marquis of the Sun, to which I have already referred, the hero is in the power of the Water King. On his way to that potentate's palace he
- ↑ Webster, p. 120; Campbell, vol. i. p. 25; "Mèlusine," vol. i. p. 446; "F. L. Españ." vol. i. p. 187; Schneller, p. 71; Imbriani, p. 411; Cosquin, vol. i. pp. 9, 25; Sébillot, "Contes," vol. i. p. 197; Grundtvig, vol. i. p. 46; Cavallius, p. 255; Maspons y Labros, p. 102; "F. L. Journal," vol. i. p. 284, quoting Lewis.
