Note 92.3 — Chapter IV · THE INCIDENT OF THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN MÄRCHEN.

Other stories recall the German Water Peter and Water Paul, discussed in a previous chapter. A maiden in a Tjame tale, being thirsty, sees water spring from the midst of some rocks in the forest and fill a rocky basin. There she drinks and bathes. But when, on returning to her father who is at work hard by, he asks her to show him the spring that he may drink also, it is already dried up. Her subsequent pregnancy is said to be the result of having drunk of that spring. She gives birth to a son round as a cocoa-nut, and covered with a cocoa-nut envelope. He turns out to be a great magician. A princess penetrates his disguise and marries him. At night when he comes out of his envelope, his wife buries it and persuades him to exhibit himself in his true and beautiful manhood.92.3 A Wallachian märchen brings before us a maiden condemned by the king, her father, to seclusion from her earliest infancy in a castle to which no men were allowed access. His precautions were vain. At the age of sixteen a Gipsy woman gives her a flower she declares herself to have found in the forest, not far from the castle. The princess plays with it until the evening, and then puts it in water until the morning. The water becomes purple-red, like the lovely flower itself, with little golden and silver stars swimming in it, like the fragrant dust on the petals. The princess had never seen anything of the kind. She was so delighted that she dipped the whole flower into the water and crumpled it up. At last she lifted up the glass, and, finding the water had taken a delicious scent, she drank it to the bottom. Before long she had reason to repent. Her condition became manifest, and her stern father would listen to no denials. Beside himself with rage, he caused her to be fastened up in a cask and thrown into the sea. There she bore a son, and was, with the child, cast after a while on shore. The rest of the story unfortunately is not so much to her credit; for she forms a tender connection with an ogre, and plots against the son who has been her support and comforter in her outcast condition.93.1 A Gipsy story from southern Hungary represents a childless woman as given by a witch a certain liquid, with instructions to pour it into a gourd, and drink it in the waxing of the moon. Unhappily, however, the child is born dead. Now, a stillborn child becomes a Mulo, a kind of ghoul dwelling in the mountains and guarding hidden treasure. This prospect was so terrible to the woman and her husband, that the latter made a journey to the mountains, and at last got the child back from the Mulo-folk, and he grew up a clever man.93.2