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 the hands. She screamed and tried to escape but she could not because it is the fate of a Yezinka not to be able to move if ever a human being strikes her over the hands with a switch of bramble.

So Yanechek took her two hands and bound them together with the long thorny switch while she wept and struggled.

“Help, sisters! Help!” she cried.

At that the two other Yezinkas came running and when they saw what had happened they, too, began to weep and to beg Yanechek to unbind their sister’s hands and let her go.

But Yanechek only laughed and said: “No. You unbind them.”

“But. Yanechek, how can we? Our hands are soft and the thorns will prick us.”

However, when they saw that Yanechek was not to be moved, they went to their sister and tried to help her. Whereupon Yanechek whipped out the other two blackberry switches and struck them also on their soft pretty hands, first one and then the other. After that they, too, could not move and it was easy enough to bind them and make them prisoners.

“Now I’ve got the three of you, you wicked Yezinkas!” Yanechek said. “It was you who gouged