The Illustrated London Reading Book by Various
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page 28 of 485 (05%)
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rocks. The giant merely awoke, rubbed his cheek, and said, "Did a leaf
fall?" Again Thor struck, as soon as Skrymir again slept, a better blow than before; but the giant only murmured, "Was that a grain of sand!" Thor's third stroke was with both his hands (the "knuckles white," I suppose), and it seemed to cut deep into Skrymir's visage; but he merely checked his snore, and remarked, "There must be sparrows roosting in this tree, I think." At the gate of Utgard--a place so high, that you had to strain your neck bending back to see the top of it--Skrymir went his way. Thor and his companions were admitted, and invited to take a share in the games going on. To Thor, for his part, they handed a drinking-horn; it was a common feat, they told him, to drink this dry at one draught. Long and fiercely, three times over, Thor drank, but made hardly any impression. He was a weak child, they told him; could he lift that cat he saw there? Small as the feat seemed, Thor, with his whole godlike strength, could not: he bent up the creature's back, could not raise its feet off the ground--could at the utmost raise one foot. "Why, you are no man," said the Utgard people; "there is an old woman that will wrestle you." Thor, heartily ashamed, seized this haggard old woman, but could not throw her. [Illustration: THE GIANT SKRYMIR.] And now, on their quitting Utgard--the chief Jotun, escorting them politely a little way, said to Thor--"You are beaten, then; yet, be not so much ashamed: there was deception of appearance in it. That horn you tried to drink was the sea; you did make it ebb: but who could drink that, the bottomless? The cat you would have lifted--why, that is the Midgard Snake, the Great World Serpent--which, tail in mouth, girds and |
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