occurs, as we
have seen, as far south as Madagascar, and as far east as India, but,
after all, does not seem to be the essence of the story, though in one
of the versions the cat does his tricks for the miller because he had
previously saved him from the hunters. The late Mr. Ralston has an
interesting article on Puss-in-Boots in the _Nineteenth Century_,
August, 1883, though in his days there was a tendency to explain all
fairy tales as variants of the Sun and Moon myths.

It is right that I should add that the servant's evening salute has
nothing to do with the story but is a tradition in my own family,
where my grandfather's servant used to utter this rhyme in a sort of
chant when bidding the family good-night.

XII. THE SWAN MAIDENS

The Swan Maidens occur very widely spread and have been studied with
great diligence by Mr. E. S. Hartland in two chapters (x., xi.) of his
_Science of Fairy Tales_ (pp. 255-347). In consonance with his general
principle of interpretation, Mr. Hartland is mainly concerned with the
traces of primitive thought and custom to be seen in the Swan Maidens.
Originally these were, according to him, probably regarded as actual
swans, the feathery robe being a later symbolic euphemism, though I
would incidentally remark that the whole of the story _as a story_
depends upon the seizure of a separate dress involving the capture of
the swan bride. Mr. Hartland is inclined to believe partly with F.
Liebrecht in _Zur Volkskunde_, pp. 54-65, that these mysterious
visitors from another world are really the souls of deceased persons
(probably regarded as totemistic ancestresses). In some forms of the
story, enumerated by Mr. Hartland, the captured wife returns to her
original home, not when she recovers her robe of feathers but when the
husband breaks some tabu (strikes her, chides her, refers to her
sisters, sees her nude, etc.).

From the standpoint of "storyology" from which we are mainly
considering the stories here purely as stories, the Swan Maidens
formula is especially interesting as showing the ease with which a
simple theme can be elaborated and contaminated by analogous ones. The
essence of the story is the capture of a bride by a young man who
seizes her garment and thus gets her _in manu_, as the Roman lawyers
say. She bears him children, but, on recovering her garment, flies
away and is no more heard of. Sometimes she superfluously imposes a
tabu upon her husband, which he breaks an