No. 65.--The Three Wishes

Gypsy Folk Tales, by Francis Hindes Groome, [1899], at sacred-texts.com

No. 65.--The Three Wishes 1

A fool lives with his mother. Once on a hillside he finds a young lady exposed to the heat of the sun, and twines a bower of bushes round her for protection. She awakes, and gives him three wishes. He wishes he were at home: no sooner said than done. On the way he catches a glimpse of a lovely lady at a window, and wishes idly that she were with child by him. She proves so, but knows not the cause. She bears a child, and her parents summon every one from far and near to visit her. When the fool enters, the babe says, 'Dad, dad!' Disgusted at the lover's low estate, the parents cast all three adrift in a boat. The lady asks him how she became with child, and he tells her. 'Then you must have a wish still left.' He wishes they were safe on shore in a fine castle of their own. They live happily there for some time, then return home, and visit the girl's parents splendidly dressed. The parents refuse to believe him the same man. He returns in his old clothes. Triumph and reconciliation. He provides for his old mother.

This story is largely identical with Hahn's No. 8, 'Der Halbe Mensch' (i. 102; 201), which lacks, however, the episode of making a bower

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for the fairy. That episode forms the opening of Wratislaw's Illyrian-Slovenish story of 'The Vila' (No. 60, p. 314), otherwise different. And the whole Welsh-Gypsy story is absolutely identical with Basile's story of Peruonto in the Pentamerone (i. 3). For the recognition of the father by the child see Clouston, ii. 159, note. In Hahn's story the child gives its father an apple; and in Friedrich Müller's Hungarian-Gypsy story, No. 3, 'The Wallachian Gypsy,' a lady is adjudged to him to whom she shall throw a red apple. Cf. also Hahn, i. 94, ii. 56; Bernhard Schmidt's Griechische Märchen, pp. 85, 228; and Reinhold Köhler in Orient and Occident, ii. 1864, pp. 304, 306.