wall
stand unfinished. They said to each other that if it were not finished
by the evening they need not give Sol and Mani to the Giant, nor the
maiden Freya to be his wife. The hours of the summer day went past and
the Giant did not raise the stone over the gateway. In the evening he
came before them.

"Your work is not finished," Odin said. "You forced us to a hard
bargain and now we need not keep it with you. You shall not be given Sol
and Mani nor the maiden Freya."

"Only the wall I have built is so strong I would tear it down," said the
Giant. He tried to throw down one of the palaces, but the Gods laid
hands on him and thrust him outside the wall he had built. "Go, and
trouble Asgard no more," Odin commanded.

Then Loki returned to Asgard. He told the Gods how he had transformed
himself into a little mare and had led away Svadilfare, the Giant's
great horse. And the Gods sat in their golden palaces behind the great
wall and rejoiced that their City was now secure, and that no enemy
could ever enter it or overthrow it. But Odin, the Father of the Gods,
as he sat upon his throne was sad in his heart, sad that the Gods had
got their wall built by a trick; that oaths had been broken, and that a
blow had been struck in injustice in Asgard.

[Illustration]

IDUNA AND HER APPLES: HOW LOKI PUT THE GODS IN DANGER

In Asgard there was a garden, and in that garden there grew a tree, and
on that tree there grew shining apples. Thou knowst, O well-loved one,
that every day that passes makes us older and brings us to that day when
we will be bent and feeble, gray-headed and weak-eyed. But those shining
apples that grew in Asgard--they who ate of them every day grew never a
day older, for the eating of the apples kept old age away.

Iduna, the Goddess, tended the tree on which the shining apples grew.
None would grow on the tree unless she was there to tend it. No one but
Iduna might pluck the shining apples. Each morning she plucked them and
left them in her basket and every day the Gods and Goddesses came to her
garden that they might eat the shining apples and so stay for ever
young.

Iduna never went from her garden. All day and every day she stayed in
the garden or in her golden house beside it, and all day and every day
she listened to Bragi, her husband, tell a story that never had an end.
Ah, but a time came when Iduna and her apples were lost to Asgard, and
the Gods and Goddesses felt old age approach