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"Well, you are a large old liar," I thought to myself, for, taking the average rule of the Kalubis at ten years, this would mean that we met him two centuries ago at least. "You were clothed otherwise then," he went on, "and two of you wore hats of iron on the head, but that of White Beard was shaven. I caused a picture of you to be beaten by the master-smith upon a plate of copper.
According to the old notion, those who were not Odin's guests went either to Thor's house, who had all the thralls, or to Freyja, who even claimed a third part of the slain on every battle-field with Odin, or to Hel, the cold comfortless goddess already mentioned, who was still no tormentor, though she ruled over nine worlds, and though her walls were high, and her bolts and bars huge; traits which come out in 'the Master-Smith', No. xvi, when the Devil, who here assumes Hel's place, orders the watch to go back and lock up all the nine locks on the gates of Hell a lock for each of the goddesses nine worlds and to put a padlock on besides.
Following my trapline or trailing the Big-horn or watching the beaver, I noticed these things and wondered about them. How came those bowlders, round and polished, so far from water? What made those scratches upon those granite cliffs? What Herculean master-smith fused those decorative belts into their very substance? What engineer built those table-topped mounds?
And I did not know until to-day how much I loved my poet. . . . Yes, I know now I loved him. I must go now. I would I had not come." Then, standing face to face, he cried, "Eh, madam, and what if I also have lied to you in part? Our work is done; what more is there to say?" "Nothing," she answered "nothing. Not even for you, who are a master-smith of words to-day and nothing more."
And so naturally did he act the smith's part, that being at a fair in a country town, and that farce being presented the only master-smith of the town came to him, saying, 'Well, although your father speaks so ill of you, yet when the fair is done, if you will come and work with me, I will give you twelve pence a week more than I give any other journeyman. Thus was he taken for a smith bred, that was, indeed, as much of any trade."
But their vulcan was the Germanic Wieland, the master-smith captured and hamstrung lame of a leg by Nidung, the kind of the Nids. But before that he was our master-smith, our forger and hammerer, whom we named Il-marinen. And him we begat of our fancy, giving him the bearded sun-god for father, and nursing him by the stars of the bear.
That was before our drift south on which we joined with the Sons of the Tree- Grove and taught them our totems and tales. Yes, and who was Kashyapa, who was Pururavas, but our lame master-smith, our iron-worker, carried by us in our drifts and re-named and worshipped by the south-dwellers and the east-dwellers, the Sons of the Pole and of the Fire Drill and Fire Socket.
This extraordinary sign attracted a great many, but the devil asked such high prices that most went away, preferring age to parting with so much money. At last one old man agreed to pay the sum demanded by the devil, whereupon he was promptly cast into the furnace, the master-smith blowing the bellows for a small remuneration. After a time of vigorous blowing the devil raked out a young man.
To let that moment slip was to descend irrecoverably from the vantage ground where statesmanship is an exact science to the experimental level of tentative politics. We cannot often venture to set our own house on fire with civil war, in order to heat our iron up to that point of easy forging at which it glowed, longing for the hammer of the master-smith, less than a year ago.
And the very sky, that we dreamed enduring, eternal, has drifted and veered, so that we find to-day the scorpion in the place where of old we knew the goat, and the archer in the place of the crab. Worships and worships! Ever the pursuit of the Mystery! I remember the lame god of the Greeks, the master-smith.
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