‘Take your legs away from the plates!’ said their father, and they obeyed, but not so readily as they might have done. Presently they took some pine cones out of their pockets and began pelting the lady who sat between them, and then, finding their boots incommode them, they took them off, and coolly gave them to this lady to hold. But their father, the old mountain Chief, conducted himself very differently; he talked so delightfully about the proud Norse mountains, and the torrents, white with dancing spray, that dashed foaming down their rocky steeps with a noise loud and hoarse as thunder, yet musical as the full burst of an organ, touched by a master hand; he told of the salmon leaping up from the wild waters while the Neck was playing on his golden harp; he told of the star-light winter nights when the sledge bells tinkled so merrily, and the youths ran with lighted torches over the icy crust, so glassy and transparent that through it they could see the fishes whirling to and fro in deadly terror beneath their feet; he told of the gallant northern youths and pretty maidens singing songs of old time, and dancing the Hallinge dance,—yes, so charmingly he described all this, that you could not but fancy you heard and saw it all. Oh fie, for shame: all of a sudden the mountain Chief turned round upon the elderly Elfin maiden, and gave her a cousinly salute, and he was not yet connected ever so remotely with the family.
The young Elfin-maidens were now called upon to dance. First they danced simple dances, then stamping dances, and
they did both remarkably well. Last came the most difficult of all, the ‘Dance out of the dance,’ as it was called. Bravo! how long their legs seemed to grow, and how they whirled and spun about! You could hardly distinguish legs from arms, or arms from legs. Round and round they went, such whirling and twirling, such whirring and whizzing there was that it made the death-horse feel quite dizzy, and at last he grew so unwell that he was obliged to leave the table.
THEY FELT QUITE AS IF THEY WERE AT HOME
‘Hurrah!’ cried the mountain Chief, ‘they know how to use their limbs with a vengeance! but can they do nothing else than dance, stretch out their feet, and spin round like a whirlwind?’
‘You shall judge for yourself,’ replied the Elfin-King, and here he called the eldest of his daughters to him. She was transparent and fair as moonlight; she was, in fact, the most delicate of all the sisters; she put a white wand between her lips and vanished: that was her accomplishment.
But the mountain Chief said he should not at all like his wife to possess such an accomplishment as this, and he did not think his sons would like it either.