Page:Folk-lore of the Holy Land.djvu/252

father; and the prince and Zerendac lived happy ever after.

One snowy day, a woman who had just given birth to a girl named her “Thaljiyeh” (“Snow-Maiden”), and straightway expired. The motherless babe was tended by her grandmother, who kept her father’s house, till she could walk about and play with other children. But then Thaljiyeh’s father took to wife a widow with two daughters, and her grandmother left the house in disgust. The new wife made her stepdaughter a household drudge. Thaljiyeh had to carry jars of water on her head from the distant spring. She had to rise at midnight to help grind the corn for next day’s bread, and, when she was old and strong enough to do this by herself, her stepmother and sisters lay abed till sunrise. It was also her duty to go out with other girls and gather fuel, brushwood, thorny burnet, or dried cows’ dung from the hillsides, then to heat the village oven^[1] and knead and bake the bread; and when, as rarely happened, there was nothing to do at home, she was sent out to gather potsherds to be crushed into “hamra” for cistern cement. Whenever there was a wedding or other merry-making, she was not allowed to go, though she sat up late the night before, embroidering many-coloured breast-pieces^[2] to deck the festal gowns of her unkind relatives. But Allah had given Thaljiyeh a sweet nature. She found comfort in