Note 6 — Chapter VI · POLISH-GYPSY STORIES

We have two other Gypsy versions of this story—one from Hungary (Dr. Friedrich Müller), and the other from North Wales (Matthew Wood, ‘Laula’). The Hungarian opens:—‘Somewhere was, somewhere was not,6 in the Seventy-seventh Land in a village a Hungarian;’ and may thereafter be summarised:—Of his three daughters two get married. The third at last has a sweetheart, who always comes to see her after midnight. Once she follows him to a cave in the forest, from which twelve robbers come out. She enters, comes on corpses, and hides behind cask. A lady is brought in; her hand is chopped off; the girl possesses herself of it and escapes home. The wedding is fixed. She tells soldiers, but not her father. At the wedding she relates a dream: ‘And, ye gentlemen, think not that I was really there, for I saw it merely in a dream.’ Soldiers come in just as she draws the hand from her bosom and flings it on the table. After which the story drifts off into a version of the Roumanian-Gypsy tale of ‘The Vampire’ (No. 5), a version summarised on p. 19.