d contend with
him in song. Next follow the songs of farewell, the mother telling the
daughter of what she will have to endure in a strange home: 'Thy life was
soft and delicate in thy father's house. Milk and butter were ready to
thy hand; thou wert as a flower of the field, as a strawberry of the
wood; all care was left to the pines of the forest, all wailing to the
wind in the woods of barren lands. But now thou goest to another home,
to an alien mother, to doors that grate strangely on their hinges.' 'My
thoughts,' the maiden replies, 'are as a dark night of autumn, as a
cloudy day of winter; my heart is sadder than the autumn night, more
weary than the winter day.' The maid and the bridegroom are then
lyrically instructed in their duties: the girl is to be long-suffering,
the husband to try five years' gentle treatment before he cuts a willow
wand for his wife's correction. The bridal party sets out for home, a
new feast is spread, and the bridegroom congratulated on the courage he
must have shown in stealing a girl from a hostile tribe.

While all is merry, the mischievous Lemminkainen sets out, an unbidden
guest, for Pohjola. On his way he encounters a serpent, which he slays
by the song of serpent-charming. In this 'mystic chain of verse' the
serpent is not addressed as the gentle reptile, god of southern peoples,
but is spoken of with all hatred and loathing: 'Black creeping thing of
the low lands, monster flecked with the colours of death, thou that hast
on thy skin the stain of the sterile soil, get thee forth from the path
of a hero.' After slaying the serpent, Lemminkainen reaches Pohjola,
kills one of his hosts, and fixes his head on one of a thousand stakes
for human skulls that stood about the house, as they might round the hut
of a Dyak in Borneo. He then flees to the isle of Saari, whence he is
driven for his heroic profligacy, and by the hatred of the only girl whom
he has _not_ wronged. This is a very pretty touch of human nature.

He now meditates a new incursion into Pohjola. The mother of Pohjola (it
is just worth noticing that the leadership assumed by this woman points
to a state of society when the family was scarcely formed) calls to her
aid 'her child the Frost;' but the frost is put to shame by a hymn of the
invader's, a song against the Cold: 'The serpent was his foster-mother,
the serpent with her barren breasts; the wind of the north rocked his
cradle, and the ice-wind sang hi