he asks is that she won't be afraid, and then he takes a good rest, and puffs himself up with as much breath as ever he can hold, begins to blow a storm, and off they go. So, too, in "The Lad who went to the North Wind," p. 228, though he can't restore the meal he carried off, he gives the lad three things which make his fortune, and amply repay him. He, too, like the Grecian Boreas, is divine, and lineally descended from Hræsvelgr, that great giant in the Edda, who sits "at the end of the world in eagle's shape, and when he flaps his wings, all the winds come that blow upon men."
Enough surely has now been said to shew that the old religion and mythology of the Norseman still lives disguised in these popular tales. Besides this internal evidence, we find here and there, in the written literature of earlier days, hints that the same stories were even then current, and current then, as now, among the lower classes. Thus in King Sverri's Saga we read, "And so it was just like what is said to have happened in old stories of what the king's children suffered from their stepmother's ill-will." And again, in Olof Tryggvason's Saga by the monk Odd, "And better is it to hear such things with mirth than stepmother's stories which shepherds tell, where no one can tell whether anything is true, and where the king is always made the least in their narrative." But, in truth, no such positive evidence is needed. Any one who has read the Volsung tale as we have given it, will be at no loss to see where the "little birds" who speak to the Prince and the lassie, or the "pit of snakes" into which folk are cast, in these tales, come from; nor when they read in the "Big Bird Dan," p. 382, about "the naked
