Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/65

Rh lost in the sea, to be drifted by waves, dashed about by the breakers.

A cur dog of the shore appeared, one that used to run by the riverside. It ran from stone to stone, it sprang from one fir branch to another, saw something black upon the sea, picked it up, and gave it into an elf-smith's {Keito) hands, into the fingers of a hideous man. The elf-smith grasped it in his hands, looked at it, turned it over: "Why, arrows might be made of this, blunt-headed arrows might be fashioned."

He smoothed a pile of shafts, a heap of triply-plumed arrows out of what had been broken off the oak, had been splintered off the brittle tree. Each one that he finished his sons feathered with the tiny plumes of a bullfinch, with the feathers of a sparrow's wing, with the bristles of a boar, with the shaggy down of a spider.

The evil one has three sons, one a cripple, the second lame, and the third stone-blind. The cripple strings the bow, the lame one holds the arrows, the stone-blind one shoots. The cripple strung the bow and gave it into the archer's hand. The stone-blind archer makes trial of his arrows near swamps and solid ground, near long farmyards. He shot a singly-feathered arrow aloft into the sky, into the oozy clouds, into the swirling, fleecy clouds. The sky shattered into holes, the atmosphere into apertures. He himself uttered these words: "The arrow has whizzed somewhere whence it will never return, nor is that by any means specially desired."

He shot a doubly-feathered arrow into the ground below his feet. The earth below suddenly splits, its mould instantaneously fissures, all at once strong boulder-stones give a crash, and stones upon the shore rend. The arrow whizzed somewhere whence it will never return.

He shot a triply-feathered arrow at the hill of Pohjola [v. Hiitola], against the lofty mountain, against the wooded [v. iron] hill. He shot so that it deflected from the stone, glanced sideways off the rock, rebounded from the stone,