father had dropped into the river; to
catch and mount a horse which is no other than the Marquis himself; and
to choose a bride from among the princesses, his daughters. The damsel
who had shown Iron Shoes the way to the palace performs the first two of
these tasks: and she teaches him how to perform the others. For the
third, he has to cut her up and cast her into the river, whence she
immediately rises whole again, triumphantly bringing the lost piece of
plate. In butchering her he has, however, clumsily dropped a piece of
her little finger on the ground. It is accordingly wanting when she
rises from the river; and this is the token by which Iron Shoes
recognizes her when he has to choose a bride; for, in choosing, he is
only allowed to see the little fingers of these candidates for
matrimony. He and his bride afterwards flee from the castle; but we need
not follow their adventures now.[191]

In stories of this type doves are the shape usually assumed by the
heroine and her comrades; but swans and geese are often found, and in a
Russian tale we are even introduced to spoonbills. Nor do the birds I
have mentioned by any means exhaust the disguises of these supernatural
ladies. The stories comprised under this and the foregoing type are
nearly all _maerchen_; but when we come to other types where sagas become
more numerous, we find other animals favoured, well-nigh to the
exclusion of birds. In the latter types there is no recovery of the wife
when she has once abandoned her husband. An inhabitant of Unst, one of
the Shetland Islands, beholds a number of the sea-folk dancing by
moonlight on the shore of a small bay. Near them lie several sealskins.
He snatches up one, the property, as it turns out, of a fair maiden, who
thereupon becomes his wife. Years after, one of their children finds her
sealskin, and runs to display it to his mother, not knowing it was hers.
She puts it on, becomes a seal, and plunges into the waters. In Croatia
it is said that a soldier once, watching in a haunted mill, saw a
she-wolf enter, divest herself of her skin, and come out of it a damsel.
She hangs the skin on a peg and goes to sleep before the fire. While she
sleeps the soldier takes the skin and nails it fast to the mill-wheel,
so that she cannot recover it. He marries her, and she bears him two
sons. The elder of these children hears that his mother is a wolf. He
becomes inquisitive, and his father at length tells him where the skin
is