Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/258

234 big hammer, he finds himself trapped, and has to promise another year to the smith. Next year the smith gets him to wait till he shaves, &c., and fixes him in the chair, with the result of another year's delay. When next the devil makes his appearance he tells the smith "your tricks will do you no further service." But the smith gets him to change himself into a silver coin and has him in his purse at once. The smith returns to his house, but neither to peace nor quietude, for the demon made loud remonstrance. It became clear to the smith that the purse with its contents must be disposed of in some way, and he determined to powder it as small as hammers could hammer it. Under his own and two "strong and bold" assistants' exertions, and with screechings and gruntings to which the previous noises were as nothing, the purse and its contents were reduced to dust, and the temporary tenant was glad to go up the chimney in sparks of fire, and the smith never saw the "black or the colour" of him again on earth. Without his supernatural assistance things went wrong with the smith, and all the money which he had hoarded up while in affluent circumstances was found to be, when examined, "little mounds of horse-dung." The smith became a cripple and a beggar from door to door, and when he died "he was thrown into a pit in an out-of-the-way place near the bank of the river" in the clothes in which he had died. Knowing that it was no use showing his face in heaven he went direct to the "bad place," where at the door he met the "bad man," who addressed him: "Thou hast come at last of thine own full free will." The smith said that "that was scarcely the case," and the devil rejoined that hell was not going to take him in at all. "There is not," said he, "your like inside the bounds of my kingdom; I light a fire never to be quenched in your bosom. And I order thee to return to the earth, and to wander up and down on it till the Day of Judgement. Thou shalt have rest neither day nor night. Thou shalt wander on earth among every place that