which cuts all manner of fine clothes out of the air, that tablecloth
which covers itself with the best dishes you could think of, as soon
as it was spread out, and that tap which, as soon as it was turned,
poured out the best of mead and wine, we have plainly another form of
Frodi's wishing-quern--another recollection of those things of choice
about which the old mythology has so much to tell. Of the same kind
are the tablecloth, the ram, and the stick in 'the Lad who went to
the North Wind', No. xxxiv, and the rings in 'the Three Princesses of
Whiteland', No. xxvi, and in 'Soria Moria Castle', No. lvi. In the
first of those stories, too, we find those 'three brothers' who have
stood on a moor 'these hundred years fighting about a hat, a cloak,
and a pair of boots', which had the virtue of making him who wore
them invisible; choice things which will again remind the reader of
the _Nibelungen Lied_, of the way in which Siegfried became
possessed of the famous hoard of gold, and how he got that 'cap of
darkness' which was so useful to him in his remaining exploits. So
again in 'the Blue Belt', No. xxii, what is that belt which, when the
boy girded it on, 'he felt as strong as if he could lift the whole
hill', but Thor's 'choice-belt'; and what is the daring boy himself,
who overcomes the Troll, but Thor himself, as engaged in one of his
adventures with the Giants? So, too, in 'Little Annie the Goose-
girl', No. lix, the stone which tells the Prince all the secrets of
his brides is plainly the old Oskastein, or 'wishing-stone'. These
instances will suffice to show the prolonged faith in 'Wish', and his
choice things; a belief which, though so deeply rooted in the North,
we have already traced to its home in the East, whence it stretches
itself from pole to pole, and reappears in every race. We recognize
it in the wishing-cap of Fortunatus, which is a Celtic legend; in the
cornucopia of the Romans; in the goat Amalthea among the Greeks; in
the wishing-cow and wishing-tree of the Hindoos; in the pumpkin-tree