ional _Maerchen_. In
these as in the widely diffused ballad of the _Re-arisen Mother_--

'Twas late in the night and the bairns grat,
The Mother below the mouls heard that,--

the idea of a Mother's love surviving her death inspires the legend,
and, despite savage details, produces a touching effect (Ralston,
_Nineteenth Century_, Nov. 1879, p. 839).

Another notable point in _Cinderella_ is the preference shown, as usual,
to the youngest child. Cinderella, to be sure, is a stepchild, and
therefore interesting; but it is no great stretch of conjecture to infer
that she may have originally been only the youngest child of the house.
The nickname which connects her with the fireside and the ashes is also
given, in one form or another, to the youngest son (Sir George Dasent,
for some reason, calls him 'Boots') in Scandinavian tales. Cinderella,
like the youngest son, is taunted with sitting in the ashes of the
hearth. This notion declares itself in the names Cucendron,
Aschenpuettel, Ventafochs, Pepelluga, Cernushka[86], all of them titles
implying blackness, chiefly from contact with cinders. It has frequently
been suggested that the success of the youngest child in fairy tales is
a trace of the ideas which prevailed when _Juengsten-Recht_,
'Junior-Right' or Borough English, was a prevalent custom of
inheritance[87]. The invisible Bridegroom, of the Zulu _Maerchen_, is in
hiding under a snake's skin, because he was the youngest, and his
jealous brethren meant to kill him, for he would be the heir. It was
therefore the purpose of his brethren to slay the young child in the
traditional Zulu way, that is, to avoid the shedding of 'kindred blood'
by putting a clod of earth in his mouth. Bishop Callaway gives the
parallel Hawaian case of Waikelenuiaiku. The Polynesian case of Hatupati
is also adduced. In Grimm's _Golden Bird_ the jealousy is provoked, not
by the legal rights of the youngest, but by his skill and luck. The idea
of fraternal jealousy, with the 'nice opening for a young man,' which it
discovered (like Joseph's brethren) in a pit, occurs in Peruvian myth as
reported by Cieza de Leon (_Chronicles of the Yncas_, Second Part). The
diffusion of _Juengsten-Recht_, or _Mainete_, the inheritance by the
youngest, has been found by Mr. Elton among Ugrians, in Hungary, in
Slavonic communities, in Central Asia, on the confines of China, in the
mountains of Arracan, in Friesland, in Germany, in Celtic countries. In
Scan