longer either," and with that he turned him back. When he got home, he
said to the she-dragon, his wife, "I met a black monk who serves in a
monastery, and I asked him about them, and he told me that a lad and a
lass had run past that way when the monastery was being built, but
that was not yesterday, for the monastery is a hundred years old at
the very least."--"Why didst thou not tear the black monk to pieces
and pull down the monastery? for 'twas they. But I see I must go after
them myself, thou art no good at all."

So off she set and ran and ran, and they knew she was coming, for the
earth quaked and yawned beneath her. Then the damsel said to Ivan, "I
fear me 'tis all over, for she is coming herself! Look now! I'll
change thee into a stream and myself into a fish--a perch."
Immediately after the she-dragon came up and said to the perch, "Oh,
oh! so thou wouldst run away from me, eh!" Then she turned herself
into a pike and began chasing the perch, but every time she drew near
to it, the perch turned its prickly fins toward her, so that she could
not catch hold of it. So she kept on chasing it and chasing it, but
finding she could not catch it, she tried to drink up the stream, till
she drank so much of it that she burst.

Then the maiden who had become a fish said to the youth who had become
a river, "Now that we are alive and not dead, go back to thy
lord-father and thy father's house and see them, and kiss them all
except the daughter of thy uncle, for if thou kiss that damsel thou
wilt forget me, and I shall go to the land of Nowhere." So he went
home and greeted them all, and as he did so he thought to himself,
"Why should I not greet my uncle's daughter like the rest of them?
Why, they'll think me a mere pagan if I don't!" So he kissed her, and
the moment he did so he forgot all about the girl who had saved him.

So he remained there half a year, and then bethought him of taking
to himself a wife. So they betrothed him to a very pretty girl, and
he accepted her and forgot all about the other girl who had saved
him from the dragon, though she herself was the she-dragon's daughter.
Now the evening before the wedding they heard a young damsel crying
_Shishki_[28] in the streets. They called to the young damsel to go
away, or say who she was, for nobody knew her. But the damsel
answered never a word, but began to knead more cakes, and made a
cock-dove and a hen-dove out of the dough and put them down on the
g