n
story of Catskin. This story contains one remarkable feature running
through many of the variants, and a second which is found in
practically all of them. Both these features are perfectly impossible
to modern creative fancy, and I venture to think we shall find their
true origin in the actual facts of primitive life, not in the wondrous
flight of primitive fancy.

The opening incidents of "Catskin" are thus related:--

"A certain king, having lost his wife, and mourned for her even more
than other men do, suddenly determines, by way of relieving his
sorrows, to marry his own daughter. The princess obtains a suspension
of this odious purpose by requiring from him three beautiful dresses,
which take a long time to prepare. These dresses are a robe of the
colour of the sky, a robe of the colour of the moon, a third robe of
the colour of the sun, the latter being embroidered with the rubies
and diamonds of his crown. The three dresses being made and presented
to her, the princess is checkmated, and accordingly asks for something
even more valuable in its way. The king has an ass that produces gold
coins in profusion every day of his life. This ass the princess asked
might be sacrificed, in order that she might have his skin. This
desire even was granted. The princess, thus defeated altogether, puts
on the ass's skin, rubs her face over with soot, and runs away. She
takes a situation with a farmer's wife to tend the sheep and turkeys
of the farm."

The remainder of the story much resembles Cinderella's famous
adventures, and I need not repeat it here. The pith of the story turns
upon the fact that a father purposes to marry his own daughter, or, in
some versions, his daughter-in-law; and the daughter, naturally, as we
say, objecting to this arrangement, runs away, and hence her many
adventures. This famous story, told by English nurses to English
children, long before literature stepped across the sacred precincts
of the nursery, is also told in Ireland and Scotland. It is also
current in France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, and many other
nations; and throughout all these versions, differing, of course, in
some matters of detail, the selfsame incident is observable--the
father wishing to marry his own daughter, and the daughter running
away.[72] This incident, therefore, must be older than the several
nations who have preserved it from their common home, where the tale
was originally told with a special value t