Roman Legends: A Collection of the Fables and Folk-lore of Rome

At another time one would have to spend hours in listening to detached incidents altogether lacking a thread to connect them, or stories of which the point had been so completely lost that they could only have been made available by means of a reconstruction too integral to be honestly attempted. As, e.g., ‘Oh yes! I know a story of an enchantress who had a gown which made her invisible, and a pair of boots which would carry her a thousand miles without walking, but I quite forget what she did with them.’ Or else it might be, ‘I knew a story of a king whose wife had been fatata (subjected to magic influence), and maligned by her mother-in-law while the king was gone to the wars; but that’s all I remember, except that in the end the queen was rehabilitated, and the mother-in-law punished’—incidents of stories recurring in every collection, but tantalisingly lacking all means of further particular identification with any. Sometimes, too, it would be only a title that could be recalled, and nothing more, as in the case of a certain ‘Uccello Biverde,’ which I have been several times assured is ‘a most beautiful story,’ but I have never yet succeeded in meeting with any one who could supply the narrative. I have further felt called sometimes to exercise a difficult forbearance in withholding some specimens which at first promised to afford singular instances of interchanged episodes, but which there afterwards appeared reason to conclude were merely jumbled in the bad memory of the narrator, and had, therefore, no individual interest, but were rather calculated to mislead. One of my worst disappointments was the case of a very old woman, who, I am assured, knows more of such things than anyone in the world, but whom nothing can induce to repeat them now. She has grown so toothless and tremulous and inconsecutive, that it is not easy to understand her; but I think her arguments are not difficult to appreciate in the following way,—that having had a long run of weary bad fortune, she had rather not dwell on stories where things turned out as one could wish to have them. She wants to go to heaven, she says, and so she believes in God, and whatever else she mustbelieve; but for anything more, for special interpositions of Providence, and anything one is not obliged to believe, she had rather say nothing about all that. ‘But don’t tell them then as if you believed them; tell them only as a pastime; just to oblige me.’ I thought I had moved her, but the utmost she would yield was to promise to think about it before I came again: and when I came again she was as rigid as ever. It is vexatious to think that a vast store is going to the grave with her under one’s very eyes and that one cannot touch it.