"That is a charming place; that is a floor to dance upon!" roared the northwind, "as flat as a pan-cake! Half covered with snow and dwarfish mosses, sharp stones and leg-bones of walruses and ice-bears lie scattered about, looking like the arms and legs of giants. One would think that the sun never had shone upon them. I blew the mist aside a little, that one might see the erection there; it was a house, built of pieces of wrecks, covered with the skin of the walrus, the fleshy side turned outward; upon the roof sat a living ice-bear, and growled. I went down to the shore, and looked at the birds' nests, in which were the unfledged young ones, which screamed, and held up their gaping beaks; with that I blew down a thousand throats, and they learned to shut their mouths. Down below tumbled about the walruses, like gigantic ascarides, with pigs' heads and teeth an ell long!"
"Thou tell'st it very well, my lad!" said the mother; "it makes my mouth water to hear thee!"
"So the hunting began," continued the northwind. "The harpoons were struck into the breast of the walrus, so that the smoking blood started like a fountain over the iron. I then thought of having some fun! I blew, and let my great ships, the mountain-like fields of ice, shut in the boats. How the people shrieked and cried; but I cried louder than they! The dead bodies of their fish, their chests and cordage, were they obliged to throw out upon the ice! I showered snow-flakes upon them, and left them, in their imprisoned ship, to drive southward with their prey, there to taste salt-water. They will never again come to Bear Island!"
"It was very wrong of thee!" said the winds' mother.
"The others can tell what good I have done!" said he! "And there we have my brother from the west; I like him the best of them all; he smacks of the sea, and has a blessed coldness about him!"
"Is it the little zephyr?" inquired the prince.
"Yes, certainly, it is the zephyr!" said the old woman; "but he is not so little now. In old times he was a very pretty lad, but that is all over now."
He looked like a wild man, but he had one of those pads round his head, which children used to wear formerly, to prevent them from being hurt. He held in his hand a mahogany club, which had been cut in the mahogany woods of America.
"Where dost thou come from?" asked the mother.
"From the forest-wilderness," said he, "where the prickly lianas makes a fence around every tree; where the water-snakes lie in the wet grass, and man seems superfluous!"