Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/47

Rh When she could get no baptist, no priest that would give them names, she made herself a christener, undertook the office of baptist. So she christened her acquisitions, bewitched her progeny, gave names to her offspring, incited them, transformed one into a wolf, turned another into a snake, made a third into a cancer, a fourth into ring-worm (F. forest's nose), the others into harmful things, called one the thrush, formed another into a cripple, another into a tooth-worm, another into a heart-eater, another into woman's enemy.

(c.)

The prodigious maiden Äkäätär [v. Naata, the youngest of girls], whose hair-plait reaches to her heels, whose breasts hang down in front to her knees, caused her skirt to flap on the summit of Pain [v. Help] Mountain, at the centre of the Hill of Pain [v. Help]. As no help resulted from that during the approach of the pains of labour she sprang aside into the sea, rushed sideways into the waves.

A bearded sea-monster (tursas) met the maiden on the turgid foam of the sea, the froth of the surging water. He made the girl his own, he quickened her. Thereupon a birth took place afterwards, an evil progeny was born.

When the time of her confinement drew nigh, she came to the rooms of Pohjola, the bath-house floors of Sariola, to be delivered of her children ; to bring forth her offspring at the far end of the bath-room ridge-pole, on the bath-room couch. She gave birth to a swarm of boys, produced a flock of children while present in one bathroom, while they raised a steam once, at one heating of the bath, by the glimmer of one moon, while one cock crowed.

She hid her children, concealed her acquisitions in a copper vat, a 'fiery' washing-tub, under five woollen