Page:Russian Wonder Tales.djvu/265



EFORE our grandfathers had learned anything, before their grandfathers were born, there was, in the Court of the Tzar of a far Tzardom, a young bowman named Taraban who was the cleverest of all the royal archers. Each day he went hunting in the fens and marshes for wild swans for the Palace table, and one evening, as he wandered with his bow and arrows, he saw seven white ducks with silver wings resting beneath a tree. So beautiful were they that he would not shoot them, but when they flew away followed them afoot, thinking: "Perhaps when they alight again I may catch one alive." The ducks alighted on the shore of the sea-ocean and there they laid aside their silver wings and becoming transformed into lovely maidens, threw themselves into the water and began to bathe.

The archer crept noiselessly near and without