ary trial; but on receiving the first
blow he could not forbear crying aloud: "Jesus! Mary! thou hast given
it me!" Another old castle in Bohemia has twelve ladies enchanted by day
as fish in the fountain of the castle garden, and appearing only at
night in their true shape. They can not be disenchanted unless by twelve
men who will remain in the castle for twelve months without once going
outside the walls.[180]

These bring us to a number of _maerchen_ in which the bespelled heroine
is released by a youth who suffers torture on her account. The
Transylvanian gipsies tell a tale of a very poor man who, instructed by
a dream, climbed a certain mountain and found a beautiful maiden before
a cavern, spinning her own golden hair. She had been sold by her
heartless parents to an evil spirit, who compelled her to this labour;
but she could be saved if she could find any one willing to undergo in
silence, for her sake, an hour's torture from the evil spirit on three
successive nights. The man expressed himself ready to make the attempt;
he entered the cave, and at midnight a gigantic Prikulich, or evil
spirit, appeared, and questioned him as to who he was and what he wanted
there. Failing to get any reply, the Prikulich flung him to the ground
and danced about madly on him. The man endured without a moan; and at
one o'clock the Prikulich disappeared. The second night the man was
beaten with a heavy hammer, and so tortured that the maiden had great
difficulty in persuading him to stand the third proof. While she was
praying him, however, to stay, the Prikulich appeared the third time,
and beat him again with the hammer until he was half dead. Then the
goblin made a fire and flung him into it. The poor fellow uttered not a
single sound, in spite of all this torment; and the maiden was saved and
wedded her deliverer. This is a tale by no means uncommon. Want of space
forbids us to follow it in detail, but a few references in the note
below will enable the reader to do so if he please. Meantime, I will
only say that sometimes the princess who is thus to be rescued is
enchanted in the form of a snake, sometimes of a she-goat, sometimes of
a bird; and in one of the stories she herself, in the shape of a monster
like a hedgehog, comes out of a coffin to tear the hero in pieces.[181]
The group is allied, on the one hand, to that of Fearless Johnny who,
passing the night in a haunted house, expelled the ghosts, or goblins,
which had t