“Then give me one of those peacock feathers to fan myself with.”
“I must refuse you,” Eva went on; “but perhaps the jackdaw, who was here not long since, might supply you, as he did me.”
“You are very unkind,” the dwarf said. “Come, now, I will give you such a pretty flower if you will only let me go a little way with you; a star-flower. Aster means—a star.”
Eva shook her head. “I cannot.”
“Why?”
“Because I think I saw you in the forest.”
And just as Eva said these words, a change came over the dwarf; he was the same, yet not the same, and she saw that he was nothing but a huge spider, and that instead of walking on the water, as she had supposed, he had come to the boat on a web stretched across the brook, on which he was now running away just as fast as he could.
Then another of the trout put up his head, and said:
“You did well to refuse him, for if he had gotten into the boat, or if you had given him the feather, he would have put a bandage over your eyes, so that you could not see, and then would have spun a web around you and the boat, and nobody knows how you ever would have got out of it.”
“He could not do it in the forest,” Eva said; “how could he do it here?”