THE FOUR GIFTS OF THE WATER-SPRITE.
(Jannsen.)
Four boys were playing one Sunday on the banks of Lake Peipus, when the water-spirit appeared to them in the form of an old man with long grey hair and beard, and gave each of them a present—a boat, a hammer, a ploughshare, and a little book. As they grew up, one became a smith, another a fisherman, another a farmer, and the last a great king, who conquered the Danes and Swedes.
After this story, of which we have only given a brief abstract, we place another, descriptive of the dwellings of the lake-spirits.
THE LAKE-DWELLERS.[42]
(Jannsen.)
Many years ago a man was driving over a lake with his little son before the ice was properly formed. It broke, and they all sank in the water, when an old man with silver-grey hair came up, and upbraided them for breaking through the winter roof of his palace. He told the man that he must stay with him, but he would give him a grey horse and a sledge with golden runners, that he might drive about under the ice in autumn, and make a noise to warn others that it was unsafe until Father Taara had strengthened it sufficiently. But he would help the boy and the horse above the ice, for they were not to blame. When the water-god had brought them from under the ice, he told the boy to go home, and not to mourn for his father, who would be very happy under the water, and to be careful not to drop anything out of the sledge. On reaching home, he found two lumps of ice in the sledge, and threw them out, but when they struck against a stone and did not break, he discovered that they were lumps of pure silver. He had now plenty to live upon comfortably; but every autumn when the lake was covered with young ice, he went to it, hoping to see or hear something of his father. The ice often cracked and heaved just before his footsteps, as if his father was trying to speak to him, but there was no other sign.