Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/59

 Rh He advances with tripping gait, approaches with deliberate steps, advanced to the foot of the tree to break down the huge oak. He struck the tree with his axe, dealt it a blow with its level edge. He struck once, twice, and a third time struck a blow. Fire spirted from the axe, flame escaped from the oak.

Some chips of the tree whirled down suddenly, some fragments suddenly came wobbling down upon a nameless meadow, upon a land without a knoll. Other chips scattered, widely dispersed themselves upon the clear and open sea, upon the wide and open main.

Just at the third stroke he cut through the oak, broke the hellish tree, suddenly overturned the thriving tree, so that the root-end gaped towards the east and the branching head fell towards the west across the Pohjola river to serve as an eternal bridge for any traveller to pass to gloomy Pohjola.

A chip that had wobbled down, that had been flung on the waters of the sea, upon the clear and open main, upon the illimitable waves, did the wind rock to and fro, did the restless ocean toss about. A wave wafted it ashore, the breakers of the sea steered it into a nameless bay, into one unknown by name, where the Hiisi folk reside, where the evil people hold their sales.

Hiisi's iron-toothed dog, that ever runs along the shore, chanced to be coursing on the beach, making the gravel rattle. He spied the chip in the waves, snapped it up and carried it to a maiden's hands, to the finger-tips of Hiisi's damsel.

The maiden looks at it, turns it over, and pronounced the following words: "Something might come of it if it were in the smithy of a smith, in the hands of a craftsman. From it a wizard might get arrows, an archer many instruments."

A fiend chanced to overhear, an evil one to observe her. The evil one carried the chip to a smithy, makes arrows, prepares blunt-headed arrows of it to become stitch and