t an old man
said: "There existed once, under the reign of I do not now remember what
sovereign, an old mandarin of the name, but you would have some
difficulty in finding him, for he has been dead three or four hundred
years." An Esthonian tale represents a mermaid, the daughter of the
Water-Mother, as falling in love with a loutish boy, the youngest son of
a peasant, and taking him down to dwell with her as her husband in her
palace beneath the waves. The form in which she appeared to him was a
woman's; but she passed her Thursdays in seclusion, which she forbade
him to break, enjoining him, moreover, never to call her Mermaid. After
little more than a year, however, he grew curious and jealous, and
yielded to the temptation of peeping through the curtain of her chamber,
where he beheld her swimming about, half woman and half fish. He had
broken the condition of his happiness, and might no longer stay with
her. Wherefore he was cast up again on the shore where he had first met
the mermaid. Rising and going into the village he inquired for his
parents, but found that they had been dead for more than thirty years,
and that his brothers were dead too. He himself was unconsciously
changed into an old man. For a few days he wandered about the shore, and
the charitable gave him bread. He ventured to tell his history to one
kind friend; but the same night he disappeared, and in a few days the
waves cast up his body on the beach.[151]

The foregoing tales all combine with the characteristics of the group
under discussion, either those of the Swan-maiden group or those of the
Forbidden Chamber group. In the myth of the Swan-maidens, as in some
types of the myth of the Forbidden Chamber, the human hero weds a
supernatural bride; and a story containing such an incident seems to
have a tendency to unite itself to one or other of these two groups.
This tendency is not, however, always developed. The two ladies in the
Chinese legend, cited in the last chapter, were neither Swan-maidens nor
female Bluebeards; and this is not the only tale from the Flowery Land
in which these superhuman beauties appear without promoting the
development in question. Nor do I find any hint of it in the tradition
of Bran Mac Fearbhall, King of Ireland, who was one day lulled asleep by
a strain of fairy music. On awaking he found the silver branch of a tree
by his side; and a strange lady appeared at his court and invited him to
a land of happiness. He h