presenting the father under a forbidding aspect. As his
daughter's vendor,--her unwilling vendor,--as her guardian from capture,
he would be the natural foe of her lover. He is not always so ready as
the Bird Simer to give up to another his rights over her; but perhaps
the Bird Simer's readiness may be partly explained by the husband's
having already performed the feat of rescuing the maiden from a giant,
beside slaying his own brother for her sake. Usually the father is a
frightful ogre or giant; not infrequently he is no less a personage than
the Devil himself. And the contrast between him and his lovely daughter
would be more and more strongly felt as purchase and capture ceased to
be serious methods of bride-winning. Hence, probably, the thought of
real relationship would be abandoned, and the maiden would often be
conceived of as enchanted and captive in the hands of a malevolent
being.

We will not now stop to discuss the tasks in detail: we can only afford
time to glance at one of them, namely, that of distinguishing the maid
from her sisters. There are three chief means by which the lover or
husband is enabled to identify the object of his devotion. Two of these
depend upon the lady herself: in the one she slily helps her lover; in
the other he recognizes an insignificant peculiarity of her person or
attire. The third means is an indication given by one of the lower
animals, which has better means of knowledge than the suitor, due
probably to its greater cleverness--a quality, as I have already pointed
out in Chapter II., universally credited in a certain stage of culture
to these creatures. We will deal first with the second means.

The most usual personal idiosyncrasy of the damsel is the want of a
finger, or some deformity in it, the result of her previous efforts to
aid the hero. Thus, in a Basque tale the lad is set to find a ring lost
by the ogre in a river. This is accomplished by cutting up the maiden
and throwing the pieces into the stream; but a part of the little finger
sticks in his shoe. When he afterwards has to choose between the ogre's
daughters with his eyes shut, he recognizes his love by the loss of her
little finger. The giant's daughter, in a West Highland tale, makes a
ladder with her fingers for her lover to climb a tree to fetch a
magpie's eggs; and, in the hurry, she leaves her little finger at the
top. This accident arises sometimes, as in the Marquis of the Sun, from
the dropping of a