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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Europa's Fairy Book," Joseph Jacobs presents a vibrant collection of European fairy tales, meticulously curated to reflect the rich tapestry of folk narratives across the continent. The anthology showcases Jacobs's signature style, which combines folk elements with a scholarly lens, ensuring that each tale retains its charm while being situated within a broader cultural context. His approach not only entertains but educates, offering insights into the morals, customs, and beliefs of various European cultures through stories filled with magic, adventure, and whimsy. Joseph Jacobs, a prominent figure in the realm of folklore studies, was deeply influenced by the oral traditions of storytelling that pervaded his upbringing. His background as an Australian-born scholar, who later moved to England, allowed him to infuse his works with a diverse cultural perspective. Jacobs's passion for folk narratives was further fueled by his desire to preserve the authenticity of these tales against the backdrop of an increasingly industrialized world, making "Europa's Fairy Book" a vital contribution to both literary and cultural heritage. For readers and enthusiasts of fairy tales, "Europa's Fairy Book" is an essential addition to any library. Jacobs's collection not only entertains but also invites readers to explore the moral undertones and historical significance of these enchanting stories. Whether enjoyed by children or treasured by adult readers, this anthology is a delightful journey through Europe's magical past. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Europa's Fairy Book
Table of Contents
Introduction
Gathering scattered fireside traditions into a single conversation, Europa’s Fairy Book reveals how the same human longings for wonder, justice, cunning, and hope travel across frontiers, trade accents and emblems, and return renewed to greet the next listener, so that resourceful youngest children, arduous quests, twilight bargains, impossible tasks, and transformations that test the heart reappear with fresh color, reminding us that diverse communities wrestle with kindred dilemmas and answer them through stories that move, adapt, and endure, stitching a patchwork of voices into one fabric of imagination that glows with continuity while honoring the character of every place it visits.
Europa’s Fairy Book is a collection of European folk and fairy tales retold by the folklorist Joseph Jacobs. First issued in the early twentieth century, it extends his well-known work with traditional narratives into a broader continental scope. The book belongs to the genre of literary retellings grounded in oral tradition, presenting materials gathered from various parts of Europe in accessible prose. Rather than confining readers to a single region, it invites them to listen for patterns that echo across languages and landscapes. It is both an anthology and an introduction to the range of European wonder tales.
What awaits the reader is not a novel with a single plot but a gallery of narrative experiences shaped by clarity of voice and an ear for the rhythms of oral storytelling. The style favors brisk movement, vivid incident, and memorable turns, maintaining a tone that can shade from playful to eerie without losing warmth. Each tale stands on its own while conversing with its neighbors, creating a cumulative mood of discovery. The selection emphasizes tales that are complete in themselves, confident in the logic of the marvelous, and attentive to the quick wit and steady courage prized in folk tradition.
Themes that recur across the collection include the triumph of ingenuity over brute force, the hazards and rewards of promises, the testing of character through trials, and the dance between luck and labor. Transformations—of beasts into humans, of poverty into plenty, of peril into deliverance—operate as metaphors for resilience and moral change. Boundaries are crossed: between home and wilderness, youth and maturity, the everyday and the numinous. Yet the tales also prize limits, warning against overreaching or forgetting obligations. The result is a tapestry where ethical questions and imaginative play sustain one another rather than contend.
Jacobs approaches traditional materials as a reteller attentive to both accessibility and the integrity of folk patterns. His versions aim for directness in language while letting motifs, situations, and recurring figures do their explanatory work. By placing narratives from different locales side by side, the collection encourages comparative reading: similarities suggest shared inheritance, while differences reveal the distinctive sensibility of a village, a region, or a language family. The book thereby serves as an entry point into European folklore without asking readers to master specialist tools, presenting stories as living artifacts shaped by circulation, memory, and performance.
For contemporary readers, this matters because the collection makes visible a form of cultural connectivity that predates modern networks. It shows how communities have long borrowed, adapted, and answered one another through narrative, modeling an exchange that respects both likeness and difference. The tales foreground virtues—resourcefulness, generosity, persistence—that remain compelling, while probing dilemmas about power, trust, and obligation that still frame everyday choices. They also invite a renewed appreciation of listening as a civic act: to hear a story from elsewhere is to expand the map of what one imagines possible, and to refine one’s sympathies.
Europa’s Fairy Book is therefore best approached as an invitation: to read widely, to listen for echoes, and to let the shared patterns of European storytelling unfold at a humane pace. Whether encountered aloud or in quiet pages, its narratives ask only a willingness to believe that the marvelous can clarify the ordinary. In return they offer delight, surprise, and steady company. Without depending on prior knowledge, the collection opens a door to the broader study of folklore and literature, while satisfying readers seeking memorable adventures shaped by clean lines, ethical curiosity, and the enduring pleasures of tale-telling.
Synopsis (Selection)
Europa’s Fairy Book is Joseph Jacobs’s curated anthology of European folk and fairy tales, drawn from oral and literary sources across the continent. In a brief introduction, Jacobs explains his aim to present representative stories in clear English while preserving regional character and recurring motifs. He prioritizes versions that are engaging for general readers yet faithful to their sources, and he situates them within a shared European tradition. The collection proceeds tale by tale, without heavy scholarly interruption, and concludes with notes on origins and parallels. Across the volume, familiar plot types appear—persecuted heroines, enchanted helpers, bold quests, and clever tricksters—arranged to showcase breadth and variety.
The opening portion centers on wonder tales that turn on domestic hardship and sudden transformation. A mistreated girl, a neglected child, or an orphan faces unjust trials set by a parent, step-parent, or ruler. Disguises, animal guardians, and magical tokens pivot the action toward courtly scenes or festive gatherings. Recognition often depends on an object, a riddle, or a test that cannot be feigned. The narrative focus is on the mounting pressure of tasks and the heroine’s resourcefulness under constraint. Without dwelling on moralizing, these tales establish a rhythm of adversity, aid, and partial revelation that recurs throughout the book.
Subsequent tales explore the enchanted bride or bridegroom motif, where a union is shadowed by a spell, taboo, or hidden identity. A household bargain, an ill-considered promise, or an unasked question drives the conflict. Human characters navigate prohibitions, bargains with uncanny beings, or quests prompted by a breach of trust. Magical transformations—human to beast, stone to life—shape turning points, and gifts or impossible errands test loyalty. The tales emphasize choices made under uncertainty, the costs of curiosity or impatience, and the possibility of repair through endurance and tact, while withholding the final resolutions that complete their emotional arcs.
The collection then turns to journeying heroes, often younger sons or underestimated siblings, sent out with scant provisions to face ogres, dragons, and riddling guardians of treasure. Crossroads choices, wise or foolish companions, and market-day encounters with peddlers yield tools that matter later: a purse that never empties, a blade that knows its work, or a cloak that hides the wearer. Success hinges on courtesy to strangers, readiness to share, and wit in reading signs. These narratives escalate through a sequence of tasks—fetching rare objects, freeing captives, or answering tests—building toward reunions and restorations kept implicit.
Clever-servant and trickster episodes provide contrast, highlighting quick thinking against formal power. A peasant maiden, a swineherd, or a disguised stranger must satisfy a lord’s challenge, steal without being caught, or out-argue an official. The puzzles—counting the uncountable, moving the immovable, or measuring the immeasurable—invite verbal ingenuity and practical jokes that upend expectations. While light in tone, these tales still pivot on moments where wording, timing, and social roles intersect, and they stress communal values of fairness and restraint. Outcomes follow logically from setups, but the synopsis leaves their final turns unstated to preserve the tales’ climactic surprises.
Witches, giants, and boundary dwellers frame another cluster, set in forests, lonely huts, or storm-battered shores. Hospitality is tested: a traveler who keeps the rules of eating, sleeping, or borrowing gains help; a breaker of taboos invites danger. The villains are formidable but bound by patterns that attentive listeners can anticipate. Spinning-rooms, ovens, and cellars hide perils and exits, while talking beasts and humble craftsmen provide keys to escape. The momentum comes from escalating perils and the careful husbanding of favors, with recognitions and reversals poised near the end. The tone remains even, emphasizing procedure over spectacle.
Recurring marvels tie the anthology together: glass mountains, secret stairways, seven-league boots, and self-filling tables. Numbers structure progress—three guesses, three trials, or three nights—and symbolic objects pass among helpers and adversaries. Oaths and promises carry weight, creating obligations that shape future encounters. Missteps—opening a forbidden door, lighting a lamp too soon—do not end the stories but reframe the tasks ahead. Throughout, Jacobs lets the motifs speak, favoring clean narrative lines over ornate description. The tales’ internal logic and spare causality keep episodes memorable, with climactic recognitions and rewards implied rather than revealed here.
As the sequence proceeds, briefer comic pieces and domestic anecdotes lighten the pace. Quarrelsome couples, foolish simpletons, and pedantic judges embroider everyday mishaps into cautionary sketches. These stand beside more solemn episodes of exile, penance, and return, broadening the emotional range. The book closes with Jacobs’s notes detailing each story’s provenance, variant readings, and analogues in other languages. He indicates when a text is a literal translation, a composite, or a retelling from oral dictation, and he signals links among Celtic, Teutonic, Romance, and Slavic traditions. The notes underscore continuity across borders without flattening regional distinctiveness.
Taken together, Europa’s Fairy Book presents a compact map of European storytelling, showing how shared plots adapt to local speech, custom, and landscape. Its central message is not prescriptive but demonstrative: that courage, patience, wit, and kindness recur as problem-solving tools across cultures, and that wonder tales balance fate with choice. By following the anthology’s progression—from domestic trials to quests, tricksters, and boundary encounters—readers glimpse a repertoire that shaped modern children’s literature and folklore studies alike. The synopsis preserves major setups and turns without disclosing conclusions, reflecting Jacobs’s careful curation and the enduring clarity of the tales he assembled.
Historical Context
Europa's Fairy Book (1916), compiled by the Australian-born folklorist Joseph Jacobs, is not set in a single locale but in a generalized, premodern Europe. Its tales unfold in agrarian villages, royal courts, deep forests, and market towns recognizable from Italy to Scandinavia and the Slavic lands. The social world is that of kings and peasants, apprentices, stepfamilies, and traveling soldiers, evoking late medieval to early modern lifeways rather than precise dates. Yet the collection itself belongs to the early twentieth century, assembled in the transatlantic scholarly milieu linking London and New York. It frames an imagined, shared European past while emerging from a modern, international network of research and publishing.
One formative precedent was the Brothers Grimm and the nineteenth‑century turn to folk tradition as cultural history. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm issued Kinder‑ und Hausmärchen in 1812 (Vol. I) and 1815 (Vol. II), revising through 1857, amid and after the Napoleonic Wars. Their aim to preserve a German Volksgeist shaped how Europe understood Märchen as repositories of social memory. By 1910, Antti Aarne’s Verzeichnis der Märchentypen began codifying international tale types, later expanded by Stith Thompson. Jacobs worked inside this comparative framework. In Europa’s Fairy Book he identifies sources and variants across borders and resists over‑sanitizing narrations, presenting German, French, Italian, and Slavic analogues to demonstrate historical diffusion rather than isolated national origins.
Nineteenth‑century nationalism powerfully influenced the collection and circulation of folk narratives. The revolutions of 1848, the Italian Risorgimento (unification 1861; Rome annexed 1870), and German unification under Bismarck in 1871 encouraged states to valorize peasant lore as proof of ancestral continuity. In Ireland, the Gaelic League (founded 1893) promoted language revival through song and story; in Russia, empire‑wide folklore campaigns shored up imperial identity. Jacobs’s response, implicit in Europa’s Fairy Book, was to edit a pan‑European corpus that de‑centers any single nation. By juxtaposing cognate plots from rival nation‑states, he emphasizes shared social anxieties—inheritance, famine, military conscription—and thus treats folklore as a historical record of common European experience rather than nationalist proof.
The professionalization of folklore shaped Jacobs’s methods. The Folklore Society was founded in London in 1878; its journal, Folk‑Lore, began in 1890. Jacobs edited the journal from 1890 to 1893, engaging with peers such as E. Sidney Hartland and G. Laurence Gomme, and in dialogue with anthropologists like Edward B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871). International congresses, including the London Folk‑Lore Congress of 1891, fostered exchange among collectors of Asbjørnsen and Moe’s Norwegian tales (1841–1844), Afanasyev’s Russian tales (1855–1867), Emmanuel Cosquin’s Lorraine corpus (1886), and Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilian collection (1870). Europa’s Fairy Book reflects this institutional world through explicit sourcing, cross‑references, and comparisons that treat stories as historical data moving along routes of trade, migration, and conquest.
Victorian and Edwardian education reforms created a mass readership for traditional narratives. In Britain, the Elementary Education Act of 1870 established state‑supported schooling; compulsory attendance followed in 1880 and fees were effectively abolished in 1891, accelerating literacy. Simultaneously, illustrated juvenile publishing expanded in London and New York, aided by improved printing and distribution. Jacobs, who had already produced English Fairy Tales (1890) for general readers, wrote with classroom utility and family reading in mind. Europa’s Fairy Book, issued in 1916 in both British and American markets, balances fidelity to archival sources with clear, idiomatic prose, aligning with contemporary pedagogy that used historical folk materials to teach ethics, comparative culture, and language.
The First World War (1914–1918) formed the immediate backdrop to publication. After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, alliances drew Europe into industrialized conflict; Verdun (February–December 1916) and the Somme (July–November 1916) symbolized mass attrition, while Belgium and northern France endured occupation and refugee flight. Jacobs died in New York on 30 January 1916, and the book appeared that year amid wartime censorship, rationing, and propaganda. Its very title—Europa’s Fairy Book—was a cultural argument during a continent‑wide crisis: that French, German, Italian, Russian, Scandinavian, and British storytelling formed a common inheritance. By arranging enemy nations’ tales side by side, the collection preserves threatened patrimonies and models a historical unity beyond the battlefield.
Jacobs’s life intersected with Jewish emancipation and diaspora politics that nurtured a cosmopolitan outlook. British political emancipation culminated in 1858 with Lionel de Rothschild taking his seat in Parliament; in Eastern Europe, pogroms from 1881 to 1884 and the Kishinev violence of 1903 spurred emigration. The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) exposed French antisemitism even amid republican ideals. Jacobs moved to New York in 1900 to serve as revising editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia (published 1901–1906 by Funk & Wagnalls), participating in transatlantic scholarship as millions migrated, 1880–1914. Europa’s Fairy Book reflects this diasporic sensitivity: it treats Italian, Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic materials with equitable attention, rejecting racialized hierarchies and underscoring the portability of tradition across borders.
As social document, the book functions as quiet critique of its era’s fractures. The tales’ premodern courts, stepfamilies, soldiers, and beggars expose structural inequities—inheritance privilege, patriarchal authority, hunger, and conscription—that persisted into industrial Europe. By giving clever peasants and persecuted children moral victories, the collection values ingenuity over birth, challenging class determinism. Arranging narratives from combatant nations together, it rebukes wartime chauvinism and suggests that Europe’s peoples share ethical norms about justice, hospitality, and restraint of power. Jacobs’s editorial practice—accurate attribution, cross‑national comparison, and refusal of nationalist editing—offers a humane, historically grounded counterpoint to the period’s exclusionary politics.
Europa's Fairy Book
PREFACE
Ever since—almost exactly a hundred years ago—the Grimms produced their Fairy Tale Book, folk-lorists have been engaged in making similar collections for all the other countries of Europe, outside Germany, till there is scarcely a nook or a corner in the whole continent that has not been ransacked for these products of the popular fancy. The Grimms themselves and most of their followers have pointed out the similarity or, one might even say, the identity of plot and incident of many of these tales throughout the European Folk-Lore field. Von Hahn, when collecting the Greek and Albanian Fairy Tales in 1864, brought together these common "formulæ" of the European Folk-Tale. These were supplemented by Mr. S. Baring-Gould in 1868, and I myself in 1892 contributed an even fuller list to the Hand Book of Folk-Lore. Most, if not all of these formulæ, have been found in all the countries of Europe where folk-tales have been collected. In 1893 Miss M. Roalfe Cox brought together, in a volume of the Folk-Lore Society, no less than 345 variants of "Cinderella" and kindred stories showing how widespread this particular formula was throughout Europe and how substantially identical the various incidents as reproduced in each particular country.
It has occurred to me that it would be of great interest and, for folk-lore purposes, of no little importance, to bring together these common Folk-Tales of Europe, retold in such a way as to bring out the original form from which all the variants were derived. I am, of course, aware of the difficulty and hazardous nature of such a proceeding; yet it is fundamentally the same as that by which scholars are accustomed to restore the Ur-text from the variants of different families of MSS. and still more similar to the process by which Higher Critics attempt to restore the original narratives of Holy Writ. Every one who has had to tell fairy tales to children will appreciate the conservative tendencies of the child mind; every time you vary an incident the children will cry out, "That was not the way you told us before[1q]." The Folk-Tale collections can therefore be assumed to retain the original readings with as much fidelity as most MSS. That there was such an original rendering eminating from a single folk artist no serious student of Miss Cox's volume can well doubt. When one finds practically the same "tags" of verse in such different dialects as Danish and Romaic, German and Italian, one cannot imagine that these sprang up independently in Denmark, Greece, Germany, and Florence. The same phenomenon is shown in another field of Folk-Lore where, as the late Mr. Newell showed, the same rhymes are used to brighten up the same children's games in Barcelona and in Boston; one cannot imagine them springing up independently in both places. So, too, when the same incidents of a fairy tale follow in the same artistic concatenation in Scotland, and in Sicily, in Brittany, and in Albania, one cannot but assume that the original form of the story was hit upon by one definite literary artist among the folk. What I have attempted to do in this book is to restore the original form, which by a sort of international selection has spread throughout all the European folks.
But while I have attempted thus to restore the original substance of the European Folk-Tales, I have ever had in mind that the particular form in which they are to appear is to attract English-speaking children. I have, therefore, utilized the experience I had some years ago in collecting and retelling the Fairy Tales of the English Folk-Lore field (English Fairy Tales, More English Fairy Tales), in order to tell these new tales in the way which English-speaking children have abundantly shown they enjoy. In other words, while the plot and incidents are "common form" throughout Europe, the manner in which I have told the stories is, so far as I have been able to imitate it, that of the English story-teller.
I have indeed been conscious throughout of my audience of little ones and of the reverence due to them. Whenever an original incident, so far as I could penetrate to it, seemed to me too crudely primitive for the children of the present day, I have had no scruples in modifying or mollifying it, drawing attention to such Bowdlerization in the somewhat elaborate notes at the end of the volume, which I trust will be found of interest and of use to the serious student of the Folk-Tale.
It must, of course, be understood that the tales I now give are only those found practically identical in all European countries. Besides these there are others which are peculiar to each of the countries or only found in areas covered by cognate languages like the Celtic or the Scandinavian. Of these I have already covered the English and the Celtic fields, and may, one of these days, extend my collections to the French and Scandinavian or the Slavonic fields. Meanwhile it may be assumed that the stories that have pleased all European children for so long a time are, by a sort of international selection, best fitted to survive, and that the Fairy Tales that follow are the choicest gems in the Fairy Tale field. I can only express the hope that I have succeeded in placing them in an appropriate setting.
It remains only to thank those of my colleagues and friends who have aided in various ways in the preparation of this volume, though of course their co-operation does not, in the slightest, imply responsibility for or approval of the method of treatment I have applied to the old, old stories. Miss Roalfe Cox was good enough to look over my reconstruction of "Cinderella" and suggest alterations in it. Prof. Crane gave me permission to utilize the version of the "Dancing Water," in his Italian Popular Tales. Sir James G. Frazer looked through my restoration of the "Language of Animals," which was suggested by him many years ago; and Mr. E. S. Hartland criticized the Swan-Maiden story. I have also to thank my old friend and publisher, Dr. G. H. Putnam, for the personal interest he has taken in the progress of the book.
J. J.
Yonkers, N. Y.
July, 1915.
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Marshal Tells how he Killed the Dragon
Frontispiece
The Herald Announces the Court Ball
1
The Soldier Lays a Honey Trap
6
The Step-Sister Cuts off her Toe
10
"
Will you Mind my Pea?
"
13
The Seven-Headed Dragon
19
The Marshal Tells how he Killed the Dragon
25
Scissors
31
Beauty and the Beast
39
Reynard
42
Bruin Gets a Beating
45
Bruin Carries Reynard
46
The Foster Mother
55
The King Begs Pardon
64
The Girl and the Frog
66
The Pope is Elected
70
The Magic Purse
73
The Princess Finds Horns on her Head
79
The Unicorn
81
The Earl of Cattenborough will be Pleased to Partake of a Potato
90
The Cat and the Ogre
96
"
Had you not better Throw me into the Millstream?
"
97
The Child Finds the Feather Dress
98
The Dolphin who Came Late
102
East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon
105
Androcles and the Lion
107
Day-Dreaming
110
The Pig's Tail
120
The Dummy
121
Anima Goes down the Hole
129
The Lamp
133
The Dog
138
The Casket
140
The Master-Maid with the Glass Axe
142
The Prince Wants his Lunch
145
The Giant Tries to Drink the Stream
154
The Visitor
159
Up the Tree
163
The Snake
165
The Three Ravens
170
The Wounded Dragon
179
The Witch
180
The Duck
187
"
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who Is the Fairest of us All?
"
201
Snowwhite and the Three Dwarfs
211
THE CINDER-MAID
Once upon a time, though it was not in my time or in your time, or in anybody else's time, there was a great King who had an only son, the Prince and Heir who was about to come of age. So the King sent round a herald who should blow his trumpet at every four corners where two roads met. And when the people came together he would call out, "O yes, O yes, O yes, know ye that His Grace the King will give on Monday sennight"—that meant seven nights or a week after—"a Royal Ball to which all maidens of noble birth are hereby summoned; and be it furthermore known unto you that at this ball his Highness the Prince will select unto himself a lady that shall be his bride and our future Queen. God save the King."
Now there was among the nobles of the King's Court one who had married twice, and by the first marriage he had but one daughter, and as she was growing up her father thought that she ought to have some one to look after her. So he married again, a lady with two daughters, and his new wife, instead of caring for his daughter, thought only of her own and favoured them in every way. She would give them beautiful dresses but none to her step-daughter who had only to wear the cast-off clothes of the other two. The noble's daughter was set to do all the drudgery of the house, to attend the kitchen fire, and had naught to sleep on but the heap of cinders raked out in the scullery; and that is why they called her Cinder-Maid. And no one took pity on her and she would go and weep at her mother's grave where she had planted a hazel tree, under which she sat.
You can imagine how excited they all were when they heard the King's proclamation called out by the herald. "What shall we wear, mother; what shall we wear?" cried out the two daughters, and they all began talking about which dress should suit the one and what dress should suit the other, but when the father suggested that Cinder-Maid should also have a dress they all cried out: "What, Cinder-Maid going to the King's Ball; why, look at her, she would only disgrace us all." And so her father held his peace.
Now when the night came for the Royal Ball Cinder-Maid had to help the two sisters to dress in their fine dresses and saw them drive off in the carriage with her father and their mother. But she went to her own mother's grave and sat beneath the hazel tree and wept and cried out:
And with that the little bird on the tree called out to her,
So Cinder-Maid shook the tree and the first nut that fell she took up and opened, and what do you think she saw?—a beautiful silk dress blue as the heavens, all embroidered with stars, and two little lovely shoon made of shining copper. And when she had dressed herself the hazel tree opened and from it came a coach all made of copper with four milk-white horses, with coachman and footmen all complete. And as she drove away the little bird called out to her:
When Cinder-Maid entered the ball-room she was the loveliest of all the ladies and the Prince, who had been dancing with her step-sisters, would only dance with her. But as it came towards midnight Cinder-Maid remembered what the little bird had told her and slipped away to her carriage. And when the Prince missed her he went to the guards at the Palace door and told them to follow the carriage. But Cinder-Maid when she saw this, called out:
And when the Prince's soldiers tried to follow her there came such a mist that they couldn't see their hands before their faces. So they couldn't find which way Cinder-Maid went.
When her father and step-mother and two sisters came home after the ball they could talk of nothing but the lovely lady: "Ah, would not you have liked to have been there?" said the sisters to Cinder-Maid as she helped them to take off their fine dresses. "There was a most lovely lady with a dress like the heavens and shoes of bright copper, and the Prince would dance with none but her; and when midnight came she disappeared and the Prince could not find her. He is going to give a second ball in the hope that she will come again. Perhaps she will not, and then we will have our chance."
When the time of the second Royal Ball came round the same thing happened as before; the sisters teased Cinder-Maid saying, "Wouldn't you like to come with us?" and drove off again as before. And Cinder-Maid went again to the hazel tree over her mother's grave and cried:
And then the little bird on the tree called out:
