"What is the elfin dance?" asked a young man; "I have seen many, but
never that."

"God grant you never may," said the one to whom he spoke; "the elves are
wonderful beings, who come we know not whence; and live, we know not how,
in the mountain gorges and woods. Probably they are the descendants of
some race accursed of God, and sentenced to live on earth, deprived of
every joy and hope. They never enter towns; do not associate with us; but
when they see a solitary wanderer, they seek to win him to them, and
exercise a most unhappy influence over him.

"You sometimes have seen large circles of grass in the meadows trampled
down. They are traced by the elves, as they dance in the summer night
when the moon is shining. Wo to the wanderer, wo to the young girl, who
at that time passes near them. The elves invite them to join in the
dance, and sometimes drag them by force away. Into the veins of any one
who comes within their circle, a secret poison is infused, which makes
him languish and die. I tell you, I fear that Ebba, good and charitable
as she is, has been surprised by those accursed beings; for she has the
pale face and languid air of those who suffer from philtre of the elves."

Sitting one morning in the room of her father, Ebba was discharging the
task she had proposed to herself in jest. She was teaching Ireneus the
elements of the beautiful Swedish language, of the Islandic from which it
is derived, and which has its ulterior origin in the old tongues of
India, the cradle of the great Gothic races. "It is pleasant," says
Byron, "to learn a foreign tongue from the eyes and lips of a woman."
Ireneus enjoyed all the luxury of such a system of instruction.

Without having what is called a poetical nature, he was not a little
under the influence of the poetry of his situation, of the beautiful girl
who taught him, of her sweet smile, and the affectionate voice which
stimulated his zeal or reproved his mistakes. Any accidental question,
any quotation, a single word often would hurry the young girl's mind to
her favorite theme, the mythology of the north.

In her early youth, she had studied the curious dogmas of the old
Scandinavians, a singular assemblage of terrible symbols and smiling
images borrowed from the flowery regions of the east, and of dark
conceptions produced in the cloudy north.

Not only did she know all the tales, but in some sort she lived in the
memory of the heroic and religious traditions