Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/48

40 eight long overcoats. She gives names to the evil brats, attached a name to each; she propped up one for him to become wind, poked another to become fire, appointed one to be sharp frost, scattered another to become a fall of snow, tore one to become rickets, designated another the worm, struck one to become a cancrous sore, another to become a heart-eater, one to eat furtively, another to stab openly, to claw the limbs with violence, to cause an aching in the joints, formed one to become gout and gave a plane into his hands, pricked another to become pleurisy, putting arrows into his fist, spears into his wicker-basket, the horses neighed when struck with their points, when the fiends had laid hands upon foals. She sends bitter frost away and caused him to sweep the sea, to brush the waves with a besom.

(d.)

Tuoni's girl, a stumpy, swarthy lassie with shaven head, was crushing iron seeds, pounding nibs of steel in an iron mortar with a steel-tipped pestle in a doorless, windowless smithy. What she had crushed she sifted, and raised up a dust to the sky.

A furious old crone [v. Louhiatar, the strong woman] ate these groats, swallowed the iron hail, the titurated bits of steel, and carried a wame full of sufferings for three full years [v. for thirty summers], less three days [v. and for as many winters].

She sought for a lying-in place near an ornamented hundred-planked church, in the house of a dead man, the house of a deceased, but found no place there. She sought for one here, sought for one there, at last she found a suitable place in the bloody hut of Hiitola, where pigs were being killed. There she reduced her wame, brought forth her progeny to become all sorts of sicknesses, a thousand causes of injury.