e night in a deep and solitary dale amid a
number of women. With great joy he seized her, and, carrying her off,
lived with her again for many years and had a numerous progeny. Not a
few of her descendants were living when Map wrote, and were known as
_the children of the dead woman_. This, of course, is not a Swan-maiden
story at all. At the end of Chapter V. I have referred to some similar
tales; and what we learned during our discussion of the subject of
Changelings may lead us to suspect that we have here in an imperfect
form a story of the exchange of an adult woman for a lifeless image, and
her recovery from the hands of her ravishers. This is by no means the
same plot as that of the stories recounted by Liebrecht in which the
wife or the betrothed is rescued from the grave. Those stories, at least
in warm climates where burials are hurried, and in rude ages when
medical skill is comparatively undeveloped, are all within the bounds of
possibility. There does not appear in them any trace of
mythology,--hardly even of the supernatural; and he would be a bold man
who would deny that a substratum of fact may not underlie some of them.
To establish their relationship with the group we are now considering,
links of a much more evident character are wanting. The fact that they
are traditional is not of itself sufficient. The fairy of the Forest of
Dean had not revived after death, or supposed death; nor had she been
recovered from supernatural beings who had stolen her away. Map's
account, to whatever his expression _from the dead_ may point, is
inconsistent with either the one or the other. Rather she was stolen
from her own kindred, to become the wife of him who had won her by his
own right arm.

But a single instance, and that instance either inconsistent with the
analogous traditions, or unable to supply a cogent or consistent
explanation of them, is not a very safe basis for a theory. What is it
worth when it is inconsistent even with the theory itself? Indeed, if
it were consistent with the theory, we might match it with another
instance wholly irreconcilable. Mikailo Ivanovitch in the Russian ballad
marries a Swan-maiden, who, unlike some of the ladies just mentioned,
insists upon being first baptized into the Christian faith. She makes
the stipulation that when the one of them dies the other shall go living
into the grave with the dead, and there abide for three months. She
herself dies. Mikailo enters the grave