piece of flesh on the ground when the hero cuts up his
beloved; or, according to a story of the Italian Tirol, from spilling
some of her blood. In the latter case, three drops of blood fall into
the lake, instead of the bucket prepared to receive them, and thereby
almost cause the failure of his task. When the magician afterwards leads
the youth to his daughters and bids him choose, he takes the youngest by
the hand, and says: "I choose this one." We are not told that there was
any difference in the maidens' hands, but this is surely to be inferred.
In the Milanese story of the King of the Sun the hero also chooses his
wife blindfold from the king's three daughters by touching their hands;
and here, too, we must suppose previous help or concert, though it has
disappeared from the text. In a story from Lorraine, John has to take
the devil's daughter, Greenfeather, to pieces to find a spire for the
top of a castle that he is compelled to build; and in putting her
together again he sets one of her little fingers clumsily. With bandaged
eyes he has to find the lady who has assisted him; and he succeeds by
putting his hand on hers. The lad who falls into the strange gentleman's
hands in a Breton tale, forgets to put the little toe of the girl's left
foot into the caldron; 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 _maerchen_ 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.[207] According to the Carmarthenshire saga, the lady is
recognized by the