"Set me free and you shall laugh again," said Knut to the weeping elves.
Now it is the elves' greatest joy to laugh. Indeed, they laugh away their short lives in the summer evenings knowing nothing of sorrow.
At Knut's words, hundreds of elves began immediately to chase away the spiders, and to set free the prisoner, loosening his arms and his legs, and unplastering his eyelids. Knut could now see his tiny enemies and his anger rose again, so that he blew pȳ once more. Oh, how the poor little creatures grimaced and trembled! They wished so much to laugh and yet they must weep because of that frightful pȳ!
Knut had not the heart to tease them any longer. He changed the note to pū and the elves became almost crazy with joy. They leaped so high in the air that they nearly overtook the larks, and as they came down, some of them alighted upon Knut and he had to shake them off. He did not notice that one elf had fallen into his pocket and remained there.
"Good-bye, little elves," said Knut as he hastily set off again on his way through the forest.
"I must watch out well for that other troll, the Forest King," thought Knut. "He is said to be the worst of all. Where was I in the Catechism? Oh, yes. 'What does that mean?'"
After a while Knut came to a swamp at the roadside where cloudberries grew in profusion.
"It can't be wrong to pick a few of these berries as I pass by, since I sha'n't have any food until four o'clock this afternoon," thought Knut. To reach the swamp he had to climb over a huge fallen pine-tree, which lay in the way. Scarcely did he find himself clambering across its gnarly trunk and thick close branches than the pine-tree, to Knut's great fright, raised itself high in air, and roared with a gruff voice:
"Good-day, Knut Spelevink. Why do you look so poorly to-day?"
Knut, hanging over the road in the pine-tree's top, still found courage to answer: