mbers together a swan
sang to us and we forgot the number we had counted."

"You didn't do your task rightly," she said, "but as I promised to give
this youth a name and to listen to the story he had to tell, I shall
have to let it be. You may tell the story now, Gilly of the Goatskin."

They sat at the fire, and while the Old Woman of Beare spun threads on
a very ancient spindle, and while the corncrake, the cuckoo and the
swallow picked up grains and murmured to themselves, Gilly of the
Goatskin told them the Unique Tale. And the story as Gilly of the
Goatskin told it follows this.--

A Unique Tale

A King and a Queen were walking one day by the blue pool in their
domain. The swan had come to the blue pool, and the bright yellow
flowers of the broom were above the water. "Och," said the Queen, "if I
might have a daughter that would show such colors--the blue of the pool
in her eyes, the bright yellow of the broom in her hair, and the white
of the swan in her skin--I would let my seven sons go with the wild
geese." "Hush," said the King. "You ask for a doom, and it may be sent
you." A shivering came upon the Queen. They went back to the Castle, and
that evening the nurse told them that a gray man had passed in a circle
round her seven sons saying, "If it be as your mother desired, let it be
as she has said."

Well, before the broom blossomed again and before the swan came to the
blue pool, a child was born to the Queen. It was a girl. The King was
sitting with his seven sons when the women came to tell him of the new
birth. "O my sons," said he, "may ye be with me all my life." But his
sons moved from him as he said it. Out through the door they went, and
up the mound that was before the door. There they changed into gray wild
geese, and the seven flew towards the empty hills.

No councillor that the King consulted could help to win them back
again, and no hunter that he sent through the country could gain tale or
tidings of them. The King and Queen were left with one child only, the
girl just born. They called her "Sheen," a word that means "Storm,"
because her coming was a storm that swept away her seven brothers. The
Queen died, my hearers. Then little Sheen was forgotten by her father,
and she was reared and companioned by the servants of the house.

One day, when she was the age her eldest brother was when he was changed
from his human form, Sheen went with Mor, the Woodman's daughter, and
Siav, th