keys in her mouth, and menaces him, hissing
and snorting fire. Unmoved by the creature's rage, he is to strike her
thrice on the head with each rod and take the keys from her mouth. In
the Duchy of Luxemburg the favourite form assumed by the princess is
that of a fire-breathing snake, bearing in her mouth a bunch of keys, or
a ring; and the deliverer's task then is to take the keys or ring away
with his own mouth. It is believed that Melusina, whose story we shall
deal with in the following chapters, is enchanted beneath the Bockfels,
a rock near the town of Luxemburg. There she appears every seventh year
in human form and puts one stitch in a smock. When she shall have
finished sewing the smock she will be delivered; but woe then to the
town! for its ruins will be her grave and monument. Men have often
undertaken her earlier deliverance. This is to be effected at midnight,
when she appears as a snake, by taking with the mouth a key from her
mouth and flinging it into the Alzet. No one, however, has yet succeeded
in doing this; and meantime when a calamity threatens the town, whose
faithful guardian she is, she gives warning by gliding round the
Bockfels uttering loud laments.[175]

But in many of the sagas the princess meets her hero in her own proper
shape, and then the feat to be performed varies much more. In a Prussian
tale she comes out of a deep lake, which occupies the site of a
once-mighty castle, at sunset, clothed in black, and accompanied by a
black dog. The castle belonged to the young lady's parents, who were
wicked, though she herself was pious; and it was destroyed on account of
their evil doings. Since that time she has wandered around, seeking some
bold and pious man who will follow her into the depths of the lake, and
thus remove the curse. This would seem but another form of the tradition
of the lake at the foot of the Herthaburg on the isle of Ruegen. In
another story the lady must be brought an unbaptized child to kiss. In
yet another the deliverer is led down through a dark underground passage
into a brilliantly lighted room, where sit three black men writing at a
table, and is bidden to take one of two swords which lie on the table
and strike off the enchanted lady's head. To cut off the head of a
bewitched person is an effectual means of destroying the spell. So, in
the Gaelic story of the Widow and her Daughters, the heroine
decapitates the horse-ogre, who thereupon returns to his true form as a