and veiled some deep purpose under a cunning feint.  His wiliness (said these) would be most readily detected, if a fair woman were put in his way in some secluded place, who should provoke his mind to the temptations of love; all men’s natural temper being too blindly amorous to be artfully dissembled, and this passion being also too impetuous to be checked by cunning.  Therefore, if his lethargy were feigned, he would seize the opportunity, and yield straightway to violent delights.  So men were commissioned to draw the young man in his rides into a remote part of the forest, and there assail him with a temptation of this nature.  Among these chanced to be a foster-brother of Amleth, who had not ceased to have regard to their common nurture; and who esteemed his present orders less than the memory of their past fellowship.  He attended Amleth among his appointed train, being anxious not to entrap, but to warn him; and was persuaded that he would suffer the worst if he showed the slightest glimpse of sound reason, and above all if he did the act of love openly.  This was also plain enough to Amleth himself.  For when he was bidden mount his horse, he deliberately set himself in such a fashion that he turned his back to the neck and faced about, fronting the tail; which he proceeded to encompass with the reins, just as if on 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