n that side he would check the horse in its furious
pace. By this cunning thought he eluded the trick, and overcame the
treachery of his uncle. The reinless steed galloping on, with rider
directing its tail, was ludicrous enough to behold.

Amleth went on, and a wolf crossed his path amid the thicket. When his
companions told him that a young colt had met him, he retorted, that in
Feng's stud there were too few of that kind fighting. This was a gentle
but witty fashion of invoking a curse upon his uncle's riches. When
they averred that he had given a cunning answer, he answered that he had
spoken deliberately; for he was loth, to be thought prone to lying
about any matter, and wished to be held a stranger to falsehood; and
accordingly he mingled craft and candour in such wise that, though his
words did lack truth, yet there was nothing to betoken the truth and
betray how far his keenness went.

Again, as he passed along the beach, his companions found the rudder
of a ship, which had been wrecked, and said they had discovered a huge
knife. "This," said he, "was the right thing to carve such a huge ham;"
by which he really meant the sea, to whose infinitude, he thought, this
enormous rudder matched. Also, as they passed the sandhills, and bade
him look at the meal, meaning the sand, he replied that it had been
ground small by the hoary tempests of the ocean. His companions praising
his answer, he said that he had spoken it wittingly. Then they purposely
left him, that he might pluck up more courage to practise wantonness.
The woman whom his uncle had dispatched met him in a dark spot, as
though she had crossed him by chance; and he took her and would have
ravished her, had not his foster-brother, by a secret device, given him
an inkling of the trap. For this man, while pondering the fittest way
to play privily the prompter's part, and forestall the young man's
hazardous lewdness, found a straw on the ground and fastened it
underneath the tail of a gadfly that was flying past; which he then
drove towards the particular quarter where he knew Amleth to be: an
act which served the unwary prince exceedingly well. The token was
interpreted as shrewdly as it had been sent. For Amleth saw the gadfly,
espied with curiosity the straw which it wore embedded in its tail, and
perceived that it was a secret warning to beware of treachery. Alarmed,
scenting a trap, and fain to possess his desire in greater safety, he
caught up the woma