Note 57 — FOLK SONGS
Reading edition
In Bukowina it used to be too often the fate of the girl of sixteen or thereabouts to be “thrown to a lover” of her mother’s choice regardless of her own passion for another. “Mothers in Austria are like step-mothers,” said a Ruthenian girl to the writer in explanation of this poem. Many a young girl has drowned herself when she found that her dreams of happiness might not come true.