Page:The strange story book.djvu/96

 round them many times, shaking his rattle all the while. At length slight shivers passed through their limbs; the colour came back into their faces, and there they stood on their feet, as well as ever they were.

When they had been in the mountain for many, many months, Mountain Dweller said one day to his wife:

'Would you not like to see your father and mother once more?'

'Oh, yes, yes!' cried both the girls at once.

'Well, you shall,' said he; 'but first I must go to hunt and prepare a gift for them. So make me a little basket, just big enough to put your finger in.'

'That won't take long,' laughed she, and on his return in the evening the basket was ready. But this basket was not like other baskets, for when the husband shook it, it grew large enough to hold all kinds of meat and bags of tallow, and when he shook it again, it shrunk and the meat also.

At dawn the next day the girls started and carried the basket to their father's. house. It was evening before they arrived, and the first person who saw them approaching was their little brother, who ran in, crying, 'Mother, my sisters are there.'

'Nonsense!' she answered angrily. 'Why do you say such things? They have been dead this many a long day.'

'They are my sisters,' shouted he. 'Do you suppose I don't know them?'

'Well, let me see the hair from their marten-skin robes,' she replied, still unbelieving, for she remembered that her daughters had marten-skin robes, such as only the chief families were allowed to wear. Then the boy went and spoke to his sisters, and pulled little pieces of the fur out. As soon as she saw the fur, the mother believed, and she and her husband and their kinsfolk went forth to meet the lost girls, weeping for joy at having found them again.

The next day the big girl said to her mother, 'There is a little basket in the woods, filled with meat. Let it be fetched.' So several people went to fetch it, but returned, saying it