ention of the gleaming fish, the swimming
phrase that accompanies the watery evolutions of the Rhine-maidens.
The ingeniousness of all this would not perhaps of itself especially
recommend the piece, were it not that the scheme is worked out to
such beautiful purpose that the whole thing is lovely, and that,
though one should know nothing whatever of the motifs, his ear
must be charmed.

Satisfied by his own logic that Mime cannot be his progenitor,
Siegfried now himself answers his earlier question: "When I run
into the woods in the thought of forsaking you, how does it happen
that I still return home? It is because from you I am to learn who
are my father and mother!" Mime evades him: "What father! What
mother! Idle question!" But Siegfried catches him by the throat,
and the terrified dwarf communicates, grudgingly, a scant fact or
two of his history. "Oh, ungrateful and wicked child! now hear
for what it is you hate me. I am neither your father nor any kin
of yours, and yet to me you owe your life...." Making his own part
in the story as meritorious as possible, he relates his taking
into shelter the woman whom he had found moaning out in the wild
woods. Siegfried, for once penetrated with sadness, wonder, and
awe, breathes forth softly, when the sorrowful story is ended,
"My mother--died then--of me?" He tries by questions to complete
the dwarf's bare account: "Whence am I named Siegfried?" "Thus
did your mother bid me call you." "What was my mother's name?"
Mime feigns to have forgotten, but, roughly pressed, recalls it.
"Then, I ask you, what was my father's name?" "Him I never saw!"
"But my mother spoke the name?" "She only said that he had been
slain." Siegfried is smitten with the suspicion that Mime may be
lying to him, and demands some proof of all this which he has heard.
Mime, after a moment's resistance, in terror of the boy's rising
wrath, fetches from its hiding and shows him the pieces of a broken
sword. "This was given me by your mother. For trouble, cost and
care, she left it as paltry remuneration. Behold it! A broken sword!
Your father, she said, carried it in the last battle, when he was
slain." Siegfried's strong good spirits have already returned.
"And these fragments," he cries, with enthusiasm, "you are to weld
together for me. Then I shall swing my proper sword! Hurry, Mime!
Quick to work!... Cheat me not with trumpery toys! In these fragments
alone I place my faith. If I find you idle, if y