“No furnace can melt this hard steel. No hammer can bend it. Yet this is the sword which alone can slay Fafnir!”
When Siegfried returned Mimi had still done nothing. He seemed to have just awakened from some bad dream.
“Ho, lazy fellow! Hast finished the sword?” he shouted.
Mimi crept up slowly from behind the anvil, looking round cautiously, lest Siegfried had brought some wild beast with him. “The sword?” he exclaimed in dismal tones. “How can I mend such steel? But, hark ye, boy”; and Mimi came close up, peering into his face; “hast ever known Fear?”
“Whom meanest thou by Fear? Never have I heard of him!” Siegfried answered impatiently.
“Alone in the forest on a dark night, near some gloomy spot, when a sudden rustle or roar startled thee close at hand, hast never felt grisly shudderings, thy heart beating and bursting in thy breast?”
The little dwarf’s description of his unknown feeling interested Siegfried greatly. He even forgot to be angry about the sword. “Right strange and wondrous must that be,” he cried. “My heart is ever firm and steady—how I long to feel sensations so new and curious—this shivering and shaking and beating and bursting! Tell me then, Mimi, how can I learn to know Fear?”
“I will tell thee!” said Mimi, delighted. “There is one I know of who will not fail to teach thee. A monstrous dragon he is, Fafnir by name. I will guide thee to his hole.”
“Where is it? Let us be gone at once. Give me the sword, I will mend it myself. Verily thou art but a bungling smith.” Heaping a mass of wood on the fire, Siegfried blew it up till the flames roared like hungry lions. Then, fixing the sword-splinters in a vice, he proceeded to file them to powder.
Mimi watched in wonder and envy. Now and then he timidly offered his advice, to which Siegfried paid as much heed as though it were the squeaking of a mouse.