s to our human forms, it were
best you did not go back. Beyond the trees is the house of a lone woman,
and there you may live until your task is finished." The seven wild
geese then flew back to the marsh, and Sheen went to the house beyond
the trees. The Spae-Woman lived there. She took Sheen to be a dumb girl,
and she gave her food and shelter for the services she did--bringing
water from the well in the daytime and grinding corn at the quern
at dusk. She had the rest of the day and night for her own task. She
gathered the bog-down between noon and sunset and spun the thread at
night. When she had lengths of thread spun she began to weave them on
the loom. At the end of a year she had the first shirt made. In another
year she made the second, then the third, then the fourth, the fifth and
the sixth. And all the time she said no word, laughed no laugh and cried
no tear.

She was gathering the bog-down for the seventh and last shirt. Once she
went abroad on a day when the snow was melted and she felt her footsteps
light. Hundreds of birds were on the ground eating plentifully and
calling to one another. Sheen could hardly keep from her mouth the song
that was in her mind. She would sing and laugh and talk when the last
thread was spun and woven, when the last stitch was sewn, and when the
shirts of bog-down she had made in silence would have brought back her
brothers to their own human forms. She gathered the scarce heads of the
cannavan or bog-down with one hand, while she held the other hand to her
lips.

Something dropped down at her feet. It was a white grouse and it
remained cowering on the ground. Sheen looked up and she saw a hawk
above. And when she looked round she saw a man coming across the bog.
The hawk flew towards him and lighted on his shoulder.

Sheen held the white grouse to her breast. The man came near to her
and spoke to her and his voice made her stand. He wore the dress of a
hunter. His face was brown and lean and his eyes were bright-blue like
gentian-flowers. No word did Sheen say to him and he passed on with the
hawk on his shoulder. Then with the grouse held at her breast she went
back to the Spae-Woman's house.

That night when she spun her thread she thought of the blue-eyed,
brown-faced man. Would any of her brothers be like him, she wondered,
when they were restored to their human shapes. She fed the white grouse
with grains of corn and left it to rest in the window-niche above her
b