"What a wonderful eye my wife must have
that she can look round a corner." Such was
the sage reflection of Belphegor.

The chest thus arrived safely at the house
of the lady's parents: Belphegor being
delighted to hand it over to the safe custody of
his mother-in-law, and to hurry back home,
that he might recruit his exhausted strength
with a good breakfast.

The second sister was carried home in exactly
the same manner as the first; but now that the
turn of the third had come, some modification
of the plan was necessary. The subtle lady
prepared a stuffed figure, which she placed on
the balcony as her representative, and then
contrived to slip unseen into the third chest, which
was placed on Belphegor's back by his servant.
As she was not only sharper but stouter than
her sisters, the burden carried by the luckless
fiend was considerably heavier than on the
two previous days; but if he turned his
head, there was the awful figure on the balcony,
for which the inhabitant of the chest did vocal
duty. Margarita, therefore, was conveyed to
her parents with all possible speed, and Belphegor
hurried back home for his usual remedy,
namely, his breakfast, but he found neither that
nor his wife prepared to receive him. Mad with
rage, he rushed about the house shouting for
"Margarita," till at last, looking out of a lower
window, he perceived the figure on the upper
balcony. As his supposed wife made no answer
when he roared forth his complaints of hunger,
he rushed into the balcony and gave the figure
a blow, which was intended for no more than a
box on the ear, but which, meeting a fragile
object, sent the head through the air, and
revealed the imposition. Again did Belphegor rush
about the house, but his wife had clearly fled, and
as clearly had she taken all her jewels; for the
cases in which they had been kept were empty.

Wronged both as a husband and as a fiend of
property, his first impulse, on the discovery
of his crowning calamity, was to post off to the
residence of his father-in-law, that he might
wreak his vengeance. No sooner, however, was
the house in sight, than his eyes encountered
a fearful apparition. On a small balcony over
the door sat all the three wives, splitting their
sides with laughter.

"Three at once!" shrieked the fiend; and
without more ado he plunged back into his
original home.

The above stories, like another which we
took from the stock of Venetian folk-lore, while
they have much in common with the most
familiar tales, contain incidents that will be
entirely novel to ordinary readers. And even
the old materials are used in a new way. For
instance, in the first story, the theft of the shoes, the
purse, and the cloak, which almost exactly
corresponds to an incident in Grimm's "King of
the Golden Mountain," instead of being all-
important as in that popular tale, is merely an
expedient to an end, for which any other expedient
might have been substituted; and in the
second story, the breach of promise on the part
of the fiend's wives, instead of pointing a moral
against the inordinate curiosity calumniously
ascribed to the fair sex, merely serves to bring
out the superior talent of the lady, and to make
the fiend ridiculous.

Very curious indeed, in our opinion, is the
selection of London as the principal scene of
action in the first story. London, one would
think, is the last place in the world that could
be associated with a fairy tale, especially in the
mind of a Venetian peasant. Generally, popular
stories, that do not professedly come from
the East, are entirely without reference to any
definite place whatever, and this omission occasions
not a little that absence of local colouring,
which renders it difficult to distinguish (say) a
Neapolitan tale from one of Transylvania or
Croatia. We may therefore suppose that there
is some special reason for introducing London
into the first of the above stories; England
appears, too, under the dominion of a queen
regnant, and though this queen has daughters, there
is no mention of a king. The royal lady
evidently reigns in her own right, and when she
dies, her eldest daughter is de jure and de
facto her successor. Taking all the facts of
the case into consideration, we may conjecture
that the pious horror with which our Queen
Elizabeth was regarded by the Catholic peoples
of the Continent as the leader of heretics,
especially after the execution of Mary Queen
of Scots, is dimly reflected in the story of
Almerigo, and that the vindictive sovereign is no
other than our own Queen Bess. Though she
is wicked, she is high spirited, and she dies by
her own hand rather than yield to the terms
which have influenced her subjects. Let us next
look at the wrong by which she is instigated.
She is enraged at a slight offered to her daughter's
personal beauty. Now, the vulgar notion
that the superior charms of Mary Stuart were
regarded as a sort of wrong by her less liberally
endowed cousin, and had much to do with
her untimely end, is just the sort of thing that
would have found favour with the multitude.
Though the fabled queen is indignant on the
subject not of her own, but her daughter's
charms, the principle of jealousy on account of
personal beauty remains the same.

Among the Venetians, the "Blue Beard" of
the second story is the Arch-Fiend himself, and
it is to avoid giving offence to some readers that
we give him the name of Belphegor. Whether
this name is familiar to the peasantry of Venice,
we cannot say, but as it is given by the Florentine
Machiavelli to the Fiend, whom, in his
well-known story, he forces into a matrimonial
difficulty, it seemed well suited to our purpose.

On the 27th of June will be published
VOLUME THE SEVENTEENTH.