Page:Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen (Walker).djvu/260

220 were changed to the Body and Blood of Him who gave Himself for the yet unborn generations.

The young priest was imprisoned in the deep stone cellars of the timber house and his feet and hands were bound with strips of bark. He was as "beautiful as Baldur," said the Viking's wife, and she felt pity for him, but young Helga proposed that he should be hamstrung and be tied to the tails of wild oxen.

"Then would I let the dogs loose on him. Hie and away over marshes and pools; that would be a merry sight, and merrier still would it be to follow in his course."

However, this was not the death the Viking wished him to die, but rather that, as a denier and a persecutor of the great gods, he should be offered up in the morning upon the bloodstone in the groves. For the first time a man was to be sacrificed here. Young Helga begged that she might sprinkle the effigies of the gods and the people with his blood. She polished her sharp knife, and when one of the great ferocious dogs, of which there were so many about the place, sprang toward her, she dug her knife into its side, "to try it," she said; but the Viking's wife looked sadly at the wild, badly disposed girl. When the night came and the girl's beauty of body and soul changed places, she spoke tender words of grief from her sorrowful heart. The ugly toad with its ungainly body stood fixing its sad brown eyes upon her, listening and seeming to understand with the mind of a human being.

"Never once to my husband has a word of my double grief through you passed my lips," said the Viking's wife. "My heart is full of grief for you, great is a mother's love! But love never entered your heart; it is like a lump of cold clay. However did you get into my house?"

Then the ungainly creature trembled, as if the words touched some invisible chord between body and soul, and great tears came into its eyes.

"A bitter time will come to you," said the Viking's wife,