and nails one of her paws to the floor. The next morning reveals to him a beautiful young woman, whom, with the customary fatuity of youth, he promptly marries. But, after a year of wedded life, the hole is by some luckless chance uncovered, and the unfaithful wife disappears, never to be seen again.
Every country adds its quota of dispraise. The story of the nightmare cat appears with variations in the folk-lore of Germany, Austria, and France. Italy tells the fable of the cock who wants to be Pope. His friend, the cat, offers to accompany the foolish bird to Rome, and eats him up comfortably on the first day's journey. In a Bavarian tale, the cat marries the mouse, and sups, without a shadow of remorse, on her small bridegroom. Now and then the picture is brightened by some unexpected touch of fidelity or gratitude, as in the Afanassieff, where a peasant girl gives the witch's cat a piece of ham, and is helped by him generously in return. There is also a grisly Tuscan legend of a servant maid who unwittingly disturbs the procession of ghosts, on the terrible "Night of the Dead." When the phantoms have swept noiselessly past, she finds, to her horror, that she has a human hand in her basket. By the advice of a wise woman, she keeps this hand a year, and on the following Feast of All Souls she ventures once again to stand in the road
