‘What are you doing here?’
‘Well, I am come to take you away.’
‘Meanwhile, my mother is going to kill you.’
Her mother, having heard with whom she was speaking, entered and recognised him. ‘So, then, it is you who are so clever, and who stole away my daughter. Hearken, then, you shall have her to wife if you perform for me the feats which I shall lay upon you.’
She gave him food and drink; he went to bed.
Next day he got up, and the witch arose also and said to him, ‘Hearken, I have here a great forest, three hundred leagues in extent. You must uproot for me every tree, cut them in pieces, arrange these pieces in piles, the logs on one side and the brushwood on the other. If you do not do that for me, I will cut off your head.’
She gave him a wooden axe and a wooden spade. He set out; he went to the forest. He came to this forest; he saw it was very large.
‘What can I do here, wretched man that I am, with the wooden axe and the wooden spade that she has given me?’
He struck a blow with the axe on a tree; and the axe broke.
‘What am I going to do now, wretched man that I am?’