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spread your table and bring your food.
- If you'd eat, my lad, you must help yourself,
- fetch your rations raw from the wood and stream,
- split your own fir-roots and light your own fire,
- bustle around, and arrange and prepare things.
- Would you clothe yourself warmly, you must stalk your deer;
- would you found you a house, you must quarry the stones;
- would you build up its walls, you must fell the logs,
- and shoulder them all to the building-place.-
- [His axe sinks down; he gazes straight in front of him.]
- Brave shall the building be. Tower and vane
- shall rise from the roof-tree, high and fair.
- And then I will carve, for the knob on the gable,
- a mermaid, shaped like a fish from the navel.
- Brass shall there be on the vane and the door-locks.
- Glass I must see and get hold of too.
- Strangers, passing, shall ask amazed
- what that is glittering far on the hillside.
- [Laughs angrily.]
- Devil's own lies! There they come again.
- You're an outlaw, lad!
- [Hewing vigorously.]
- A bark-thatched hovel
- is shelter enough both in rain and frost.
- [Looks up at the tree.]
- Now he stands wavering. There; only a kick,
- and he topples and measures his length on the ground;-
- the thick-
