food he has left for her, incloses only a murdered prince who is left there with the dagger in his heart. She restores him to life with her master's ointment, and flies with him after she has put Ohimé into a magical sleep.
In these stories the ogre is Pluto, the lord at once of riches and of death, possessing, too, and jealously guarding, the means of revival which he himself never uses. It is reserved for the heroine—the cleverest, brightest, best of all his unfortunate victims—by her beneficent prying to find and bring back to life these dead ones, and lo steal from him his treasures. At this point the tale of "Bluebeard" unites with that of "The Forty Robbers"; for, when the heroine has fled with his hoard and all his captives, the monster cannot rest without revenge. Ohimé, awaking, vows vengeance on his deceiver. A hollow statue is made for him of silver, in which he hides, taking with him instruments of music. He causes it to be offered for hire as a musical statue of St. Nicholas, until the heroine, who is of course wedded to the prince she has rescued, persuades her husband to hire it for her, and to place it in her bedroom. This is what Ohimé desires. He comes out by night from his hiding-place, and, having laid a spell of sleep upon all the inhabitants of the palace except the heroine, proceeds to the kitchen, where he boils a cauldron full of oil, with intent to pitch her into it. In the struggle, however, for that purpose, the spell is broken, and Ohimé himself suffers the punishment he had prepared for her. The same series of events is the sequel to another Sicilian story of "The Dead Hand" type, entitled "The Slave,"[1] and, with some variation, to an Arabic story in Spitta Bey's collection,[2] It also occurs in some tales of the "Bluebeard" type proper;[3] but it is the usual termination to those of a group closely allied to "The Dead Hand" type, in which the heroine marries a stranger, who takes her to his palace in the depths of the forest, where he is dis-
- ↑ Pitré, Bibliotheca, vol. iv. Story No. 19, p. 175. "A Slave" is explained by M. Mattia Di Martino, another Sicilian folk-lore student, to mean a dark or black-haired man—"uomo di pel bruno."—Archivio, vol, iv. p. 98.
- ↑ G. Spitta Bey, Contes Arabes Modernes, Story No. 5, p. 61.
- ↑ Tuscan Fairy Tales, Story No. 7, p. 63. Imbriani, op, cit. Story No. 23, p. 290. Legrand, op. cit. p. 115.
