Well, she changed herself into a duck on a beautiful pond, and he changed himself into a swan. Her mother, the witch, making up to them, said to them, ‘Oh! I am just going to capture you, to take you both back with me.’
She proceeded to drink up the water of the pond. Then the swan flung himself upon the witch, and battered in her head.
‘That’s what my wife advised me to do,’ he remarked.
Then they renewed their journey, and went away with the help of God. They had gone yet some leagues further on; then the father set out in pursuit of them. His daughter sees her father coming, and says she to her husband, ‘Now change yourself into an old man, and I will change myself into a church.’
The father arrives, but finds nobody. He sees a church in the middle of a forest, and he says to himself, this sorcerer, ‘I am now a hundred years old, but never yet have I seen a church in the depths of a forest with an old man inside it.’ So he went back to his house with the good God. When he got there, his two daughters said to him, ‘Our mother has been killed. We knew not that she had exposed all the tricks to him, and they have ended by killing our mother.’
They journeyed still further away into the world. She sees, the wife of the nobleman’s son, that her youngest sister is pursuing them. She says to him, ‘I will change myself into a duck, and do you change yourself into a drake, and you must do the same thing to her as you did to my mother.’
Well, he stopped there and changed himself into a drake, and she changed herself into a beautiful duck. Her sister came up, and proceeded to entreat her, ‘My dear sister, come back with me, for if you do not I will kill myself.’
Then the drake flung himself upon this sister, and battered her with blows of his wings, and gave her no respite; again he flung himself on her and battered in her head. Well, then they set out, and resumed their journey with the good God. [[197]]
‘Now,’ said they to themselves, ‘nobody will pursue us any more.’
They arrived, this nobleman’s son and his wife, at the house of that same miller who had hidden him in a sack.