Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/71

Rh The woman upset it into her small beer, Osmotar into her ale. The ale became depraved, made men deficient of sense, caused the half-witted to brawl, the fools to play the fool, the children to cry, and other folk to grieve.

The lovely maiden Kalevatar, a girl with neat fingers, brisk in her movements, ever light of foot, was moving over a seam of the planks, dancing about on the centre of the floor, when she saw a leaf upon the floor and picked it up. She looks at it, turns it over: "What would come of this, in the hands of a lovely woman, in the fingers of a kindly maiden?"

She placed it in a woman's hands, in the fingers of a kindly miaiden. The woman rubbed it with both her hands against her thighs, and thereby a bee was born. The bee, the lively bird, flew away at full speed, soon flew a long distance, quickly reduced the intervening space, to an island in the open main, to a skerry in the sea, to a. honey-dripping meadow, to the margin of a honeyed field. A short interval elapsed, a very little time slipped by, already it returns buzzing, making a mighty fuss, brought virgin honey on its wing, carried honey under its cloak, which it placed in the woman's hand, in the fingers of the kindly maiden.

Osmotar thrust it into her ale, the woman into her small beer. Then the new drink began to rise, the ruddy ale to work in the new wooden vat, in the two-handled tub of birch. The ale, the extract to be drunk by men, was ready for use.

(b.)

Hops shouted from a tree; water whispered from a stream; barley from the edge of a ploughed field: "When shall we get together, when unite one with the other, at the feast of All-hallows {Kekri), or at Yule, or not till Easter-tide? 'Tis tedious living alone, 'tis pleasanter in twos and threes."

The kindly maiden, the girl of Pohja [v. Osmotar the