"He felt that it did him good to sit there; and afterwards he went whenever things were wrong at home. His wife wept when he was gone.
"But one day when he was sitting there, he saw the huldre sitting all alive on the other side blowing her horn. He called over—
'Ah, dear, art thou come! all around thee is shining!
Ah, blow now again! I am sitting here pining.'
"Then she answered—
'Away from thy mind the dreams I am blowing;
Thy rye is all rotting for want of mowing.'
"But then the lad felt frightened and went home again. Ere long, however, he grew so tired of his wife that he was obliged to go to the forest again, and he sat down on the cliff. Then was sung over to him—
'I dreamed thou wast here; ho, hasten to bind me!
No; not over there, but behind you will find me.'
"The lad jumped up and looked around him, and caught a glimpse of a green petticoat just slipping away between the shrubs. He followed, and it came to a hunting all through the forest. So swift-footed as that huldre, no human creature could be: he flung steel over her again and again, but still she ran on just as well as ever. But soon the lad saw, by her pace, that she was beginning to grow tired, though he saw, too, by her shape, that she could be no other than the huldre. 'Now,' he thought, you'll be mine easily;' and he caught hold on her so suddenly and roughly that they both fell, and rolled down the hills a long way before they could stop themselves. Then the huldre laughed till it seemed to the lad the mountains sang again. He took her upon his knee; and so beautiful she was, that never in all his life he had seen any one like her: exactly like her, he thought his wife should have been. 'Ah, who are you who are so beautiful?' he asked, stroking her cheek. She blushed rosy red. 'I'm your wife,' she answered."
The girls laughed much at that tale, and ridiculed the lad. But Godfather asked Arne if he had listened well to it.
"Well, now I'll tell you something," said a little girl with a little round face, and a very little nose:—