History of What Befel the Fowl-let with the Fowler (Pp. 119-128).
One of the most curious stories relative to the escape of a captured prey is to be found in the 5th Canto of the Finnish Kalevala. Väinäimöinen, the old minstrel, is fishing in the lake where his love, Aino, has drowned herself, because she would not marry an old man. He hooks a salmon of very peculiar appearance, and while he is speculating about cutting it up and cooking it, it leaps from the boat into the water, and then reproaches him with his folly, telling him that it is Aino (now transformed into a water-nymph) who threw herself in his way to be his life-companion, but that owing to his folly in proposing to eat her, he has now lost her for ever. Hereupon she disappears, and all his efforts to rediscover her are fruitless.