has a shirt of swan's feathers which plays the same part as the wolfskin
cape or girdle of the werewolf. If you could get hold of a werewolf's
sack and burn it, a permanent cure was effected. No danger of a relapse,
unless the Devil furnished him with a new wolfskin. So the swan-maiden
kept her human form, as long as she was deprived of her tunic of
feathers. Indo-European folk-lore teems with stories of swan-maidens
forcibly wooed and won by mortals who had stolen their clothes. A man
travelling along the road passes by a lake where several lovely girls
are bathing; their dresses, made of feathers curiously and daintily
woven, lie on the shore. He approaches the place cautiously and steals
one of these dresses. [90] When the girls have finished their bathing,
they all come and get their dresses and swim away as swans; but the one
whose dress is stolen must needs stay on shore and marry the thief. It
is needless to add that they live happily together for many years,
or that finally the good man accidentally leaves the cupboard door
unlocked, whereupon his wife gets back her swan-shirt and flies away
from him, never to return. But it is not always a shirt of feathers. In
one German story, a nobleman hunting deer finds a maiden bathing in a
clear pool in the forest. He runs stealthily up to her and seizes her
necklace, at which she loses the power to flee. They are married, and
she bears seven sons at once, all of whom have gold chains about their
necks, and are able to transform themselves into swans whenever they
like. A Flemish legend tells of three Nixies, or water-sprites, who came
out of the Meuse one autumn evening, and helped the villagers celebrate
the end of the vintage. Such graceful dancers had never been seen in
Flanders, and they could sing as well as they could dance. As the night
was warm, one of them took off her gloves and gave them to her partner
to hold for her. When the clock struck twelve the other two started off
in hot haste, and then there was a hue and cry for gloves. The lad would
keep them as love-tokens, and so the poor Nixie had to go home without
them; but she must have died on the way, for next morning the waters of
the Meuse were blood-red, and those damsels never returned.

In the Faro Islands it is believed that seals cast off their skins every
ninth night, assume human forms, and sing and dance like men and women
until daybreak, when they resume their skins and their seal natures.
Of c