yours here."

They sat down for a bit and chatted. Her mother got
dinner ready for her, and she dined.

"What's your husband's name?" asked her mother.

"Osip," she replied.

"And how are you to get home?"

"I shall go to the dike, and call out, 'Osip, Osip, come
here!' and he'll come."

"Lie down, daughter, and rest a bit," said the mother.

So the daughter lay down and went to sleep. The mother
immediately took an axe and sharpened it, and went down to the
dike with it. And when she came to the dike, she began calling
out,

"Osip, Osip, come here!"

No sooner had Osip shown his head than the old woman
lifted her axe and chopped it off. And the water in the pond
became dark with blood.

The old woman went home. And when she got home her
daughter awoke.

"Ah! mother," says she, "I'm getting tired of being here; I'll
go home."

"Do sleep here to-night, daughter; perhaps you won't have
another chance of being with me."

So the daughter stayed and spent the night there. In the
morning she got up and her mother got breakfast ready for her;
she breakfasted, and then she said good-bye to her mother and
went away, carrying her little girl in her arms, while her boy
followed behind her. She came to the dike, and called out:

"Osip, Osip, come here!"

She called and called, but he did not come.

Then she looked into the water, and there she saw a head
floating about. Then she guessed what had happened.

"Alas! my mother has killed him!" she cried.

There on the bank she wept and wailed. And then to her
girl she cried:

"Fly about as a wren, henceforth and evermore!"

And to her boy she cried:

"Fly about as a nightingale, my boy, henceforth and evermore!"

"But I," she said, "will fly about as a cuckoo, crying
'Cuckoo!' henceforth and evermore!"

[Stories about serpent-spouses are by no means
uncommon, but I can find no parallel to the above so
far as the termination is concerned. Benfey quotes or
refers to a great number of the transformation tales
in which a husband or a wife appears at times in the
form of a snake (Panchatantra, i. pp. 254-7 266-7).
Sometimes, when a husband of this kind has doffed his
serpent's skin, his wife seizes it, and throws it into
the fire. Her act generally proves to be to her
advantage, as well as to his, but not always. On a