of the first wife. Quarrelling with her one
day, she reproaches the latter with being nothing but a ghost. The next
morning when the husband awoke, his first wife was no longer by his
side. She had returned to the Spirit Land; and the following night both
he and the child died in their sleep--called by the first wife to
herself.[224] These sagas bring us back to that of Melusina, who
disappears, it will be recollected, not when the count, her husband,
breaks the taboo, but when, by calling her a serpent, he betrays his
guilty knowledge.

A name, indeed, is the cause of offence and disappearance in many other
of these stories. The chieftain of the Quins, who owned the Castle of
Inchiquin on the lake of that name, near the town of Ennis in Ireland,
found in one of the many caves of the neighbourhood a lady who consented
to become his bride, only stipulating that no one bearing the name of
O'Brien should be allowed to enter the castle gate. When this
prohibition was infringed she sprang through a window with her child
into the lake. The property has long since passed into the hands of the
O'Briens; and amid the ruins of the castle the fatal window is still
shown nearly as perfect as when the supernatural lady leaped through it
into the waters. It may be safely said that the primitive form of the
taboo has not come down to us in this tale, and that it owes its
present form to the fact that the O'Briens have acquired the estates
once owned by the Quins. Probably the utterance of some hateful name was
forbidden. But whatever name may have been able to disturb the
equanimity of the Lady of Inchiquin, we are now familiar enough with
these superstitions to understand why a holy name should be tabooed by
the goat-footed fairy wife of Don Diego Lopez in the Spanish tale
narrated by Sir Francis Palgrave. "Holy Mary!" exclaimed the Don, as he
witnessed an unexpected quarrel among his dogs, "who ever saw the like?"
His wife, without more ado, seized her daughter and glided through the
air to her native mountains. Nor did she ever return, though she
afterwards, at her son's request, supplied an enchanted horse to release
her husband when in captivity to the Moors. In two Norman variants the
lady forbids the utterance in her presence of the name of Death.[225]

These high-born heroines had, forsooth, highly developed sensibilities.
The wife of a Teton (the Tetons are a tribe of American natives)
deserted him, abandoned her infant to h