there. Again they began to discourse on all sorts of topics, and the gamekeeper mentioned what he had heard under the gallows; how he had discovered the water, and finally, also, how he had got the light of his eyes again, and he added that the strange man ought now to believe that right in the world still remained right. The strange man was very much astonished, and said that he was ready to believe it.
After this the gamekeeper pursued his way and came to his princess, and they had a grand wedding festival for a whole week in succession. The strange man now thinks to himself that he will go under the gallows: perhaps he, too, may discover things as the gamekeeper had done, and afterwards get some princess for his wife. And he goes there just as the year has run out. He hears eleven strike, and then after a little while a tapping, then again some one, and in no long time a third joins them. They begin to speak among themselves, and number one says: ‘It cannot be but last year some one overheard us, for everything which we had contrived has been spoilt and ruined. So before we recount to one another the past year’s performances, let us make a thorough search.” Forthwith they begin to search, and soon light upon the strange man. They rend him in three pieces and hang them upon the three arms of the gallows.
Now when the old king was dead, his people choose the gamekeeper to be their king, and if he is not yet dead, he is still ruling at the present day, and sticks to his faith in right being always and for ever right—in his kingdom at all events.
NOTE.
Just as the Venetian story, The Love of the Three Oranges, is a corrupted version of the Three Citrons, so the present story is a more modern and corrupted version of Father Know-All. We have left far behind us the open-air life of nature with its complete moral indifference and exuberant vitality as depicted in the earlier myths, and have got into an atmosphere of pot-houses, gallows, pettifogging lawyers and morality. It is worth noticing how in many of the Venetian variants, also relatively modern, pot-houses take the place of castles. This is the case in the Three Waiters, a variant of the Cymbeline legend, and also in others. Another indication of its more recent character is the confusion of the dates and the transference of the pin and dove incident, properly belonging to the epilogue of the Three Citrons, in a very corrupted form to an earlier section of the story, just as the three kings of the Sun-horse legend with their jewels of ice and snow have taken the place of the three Norns present at the birth of Plavachek in the more modern Bethlehem variant.
Both these variants are interesting and important as giving an indication of the great antiquity of the primitive myth.
