Roman Legends: A collection of the fables and folk-lore of Rome. Rachel Harriette Busk
she touched the water with her rod and bade the whale swallow the queen. The whale obeyed the stroke of the wand imparted through the water, and the stepmother went up and threw herself on the queen’s bed. When she had well wrapped herself in the coverlets so as to be hidden, she called the maids to her and bid them tell the king that the queen was sick. The king immediately came in all haste to assure himself of the state of the queen. ‘I am ill indeed, very ill!’ cried the pretended queen, groaning between whiles; ‘and there is no hope for me, for there is only one remedy for my malady, and that I cannot take.’
‘Tell me the one remedy at least,’ said the king.
‘The one only remedy for me is the blood of the viceroy, and that I could not take.’
‘It is a dreadful remedy indeed,’ said the king; ‘but if it is the only thing to save your life, I must make you take it.’
‘Oh, no! I could not take it!’ exclaimed the pretended queen, for the sake of appearing genuine.
But the king, bent on saving her life at any price, sent and had the viceroy taken possession of and secured, ready to be slain,8 in one of the lower chambers of the palace. The windows of this chamber looked out upon the fish-pond.
The viceroy looked out of the window on to the fishpond, and immediately there came a voice up to him, speaking out of the whale, and saying, ‘Save me, my brother, for here am I imprisoned in the whale, and behold two children are born to me.’
But her brother could only answer, ‘I can give help to none, for I also am in peril of death, being bound and shut up ready to be slain!’
Then a voice of lamentation came up from within the whale saying, ‘Woe is me that my brother is to be slain, and I and my children are shut up in this horrible place! Woe is me!’
Presently, the gardener hearing these lamentations, went to the king, saying, ‘O, king! come down thyself and hear the voice of one that waileth, and the voice cometh as from within the whale.’
The king went down, and at once recognised the voice of the queen; then he commanded that the whale should be ripped open; no sooner was this done than the queen and her two children were brought to light. The king embraced them all, and said, ‘Who then is she that is in the queen’s bed?’ and he commanded that she should be brought before him. When the queen had seen her she said, ‘This is my stepmother;’ and when the pilgrim’s weeds, which she had taken off, were also found, and it was shown that it was she who had worked all this mischief, the king pronounced that she was a witch, and she was put to death, and the viceroy was set at liberty.
[I now come to three stories more strictly of the Cinderella type than the two last, but no stepmother appears in them.]
2 I am inclined to think there was some forgetfulness here on the part of the narrator; such artifices always fulfil the conditions they evade in some underhand way—they never set them utterly at defiance, as in the instance in the text. Such conditions also always go in threes; the third was probably forgotten in this instance. ↑
3 ‘Pizza,’ a cake made of Indian corn. ↑
4 ‘Cartoccio,’ a conical paper parcel. ↑
6 ‘Biocca cogli polsini d’oro,’ a hen and chickens all of gold; ‘biocca’ is a word used by peasants for ‘gallina,’ and ‘polsini’ for ‘pollastri.’ ↑
7 ‘Pescheria,’ ordinarily ‘fish-market,’ but sometimes, as in this place, a tank or piece of water for preserving fish for table. That so large a fish as a whale should be kept in one, is only one of the exaggerations proper to the realm of fable. ↑
8 The very incident which occurs in the stepmother story of ‘How the Serpent-gods were Propitiated,’ in ‘Sagas from the Far East.’ ↑
THE POT OF MARJORAM. 1
They say there was once a father who was a rich, very rich, merchant, and the daughters had been used all their lives to have every thing that money could buy them, so that one day when the father was going to a distant mart where he expected to find the choicest wares, and asked them what he should bring home, they scarcely knew what to ask. But when he told them he expected to find shawls of such brilliant hues as they had never seen, with gold threads interwoven, the eldest instantly begged him to bring her one of these; and when he said he expected to find coverlets of bird plumage vieing with the rainbow in brilliancy, the second entreated him to bring her one of these.
The third daughter, however, who was distinguished by stay-at-home habits, and by her distaste for vanity of every kind, would not have any of these gay ornaments, though he not only offered her shawls and coverlets such as her sisters revelled in the idea of possessing, but precious jewelry, sparkling rubies, and rarest pearls. She would have none of these, but asked him only to bring her a pot of marjoram, which she wanted for household uses as none was to be got in the country where they were living.
The father soon after set out on his travels, and having reached his destination did not fail, while laying in his rare and precious stock, to select the choicest specimens to bestow on his two eldest daughters.
But the homely pot of marjoram quite went out of his head, and he returned homewards without having so much as thought of it.
He was nearly home when he was accosted on the way by a strange-looking man one evening, who asked him if he would not buy of him a pot of marjoram.
‘A pot of marjoram!’ The words brought back his youngest daughter’s request whom he would not have disappointed for all the world.
‘A pot of marjoram, say you? Yes, it’s just what I want. Give it here, and there’s something extra because it is just what I want;’ and throwing him money to three or four times the ordinary value of the article, he called to an attendant to stow the pot on to the pack-saddle of one of the mules.
But the stranger held back the pot and laughed in his face.
‘I had thought you were a trader,’ he said, ‘and knew enough of the rules of trade to let a man fix his own price on his own wares.’
The merchant laughed in his turn at what seemed to him an insolent comparison.
‘When a trader goes