blue, silk
handkerchief,--a predilection which the robber did not fail to provide
him with the opportunity of gratifying, and of repenting.[108]

Other tales represent the thief as compelled to restore the stolen
goods. Thus a man who found the trolls on the Danish isle of Fuur
carrying their treasures out into the air, shot thrice over them, and
thereby forced the owners to quit them. He caught up the gold and silver
and rode off with it, followed by the chief troll. But after he got into
the house and shut the doors there was such a storming and hissing
outside, that the whole house seemed ablaze. Terrified, he flung the bag
wherein he had secured the treasures out into the night. The storm
ceased, and he heard a voice crying: "Thou hast still enough." In the
morning he found a heavy silver cup, which had fallen behind a chest of
drawers. Again, a farm servant of South Kongerslev, in Denmark, who went
at his master's instance, on Christmas Eve, to see what the trolls in a
neighbouring hill were doing, was offered drink from a golden cup. He
took the cup, and casting out its contents, spurred his horse from the
spot, hotly pursued. On the way back he passed the dwelling of a band of
trolls at enmity with those from whom he had stolen the cup. Counselled
by them, he took to the ploughed field, where his pursuers were unable
to follow him, and so escaped. The farmer kept the goblet until the
following Christmas Eve, when his wife imprudently helped a tattered
beggar to beer in it. It is not wonderful that both the cup and the
beggar vanished; but we are to understand that the beggar was a troll.
Perhaps he was. In Thyholm, a district of Denmark, there is a range of
lofty mounds formerly inhabited by trolls. Some peasants who were once
passing by these mounds prayed the trolls to give them some beer. In a
moment a little creature came out and presented a large silver can to
one of the men, who had no sooner grasped it than he set spurs to his
horse, with the intention of keeping it. But the little man of the mound
was too quick for him, for he speedily caught him and compelled him to
return the can. In a Pomeranian story the underground folk forestalled
the intention to rob them on the part of a farmer's boy whose thirst
they had quenched with a can of delicious brown-beer. Having drunk, he
hid the can itself, with the object of taking it home when his day's
work was done, for it was of pure silver; but when he afterwards