The sun was rising.  He rubbed his eyes and looked around, but there was no trace of the horrid snakes and the marsh where they had had the festival the night before.  That was miles behind him!  How lucky he was!  He had escaped safely!

He slept through the afternoon and awoke recovered from the fatigue and horrors of the night.  He decided to go into the woods that night, to learn what he had gained by tasting the milk of a sky goat and to see if the hidden secrets would be revealed to him.  As the day turned to dusk, he returned to the woods.  High up in the treetops, in the hue of the evening glow, he saw golden bathing benches hanging from silver bunches of birch twigs.  Silver wash basins lay upon the benches.  No living creature was anywhere in sight.  Who would come to wash themselves in the woods?

A full moon was shining brightly, and the youth had spent some time waiting, when he heard a light noise.  From all directions, he saw lovely maidens approach the tree.  They were lovelier than he could ever have imagined.  They were the fair and graceful daughters of the Wood Spirit and Murueit (the mother of nature and the creator of vegetation in Estonian folklore), whose unearthly beauty no mortal eyes had ever seen.  High up in the tree on the golden benches, in the silvery moonlight, the maidens bathed and whisked themselves.

The youth watched them from his hiding place behind a bush, marveling at their beauty.  As soon as the faint dawn of a new day appeared in the east, the benches and the maidens vanished from sight, as if they had melted away in a cloud of fog.

Night after night, the youth returned to the same place in the woods.  But he never saw the bathing nymphs again.  His heart was full of longing, and it seemed to him as if he could never enjoy anything in the world again.  As time passed, he suffered, anguished, and finally died of a broken heart.

Animal Fables: The Wind, the Spider, and the Fly

The oldest form in folklore is stories about animals.  These stories are found everywhere, at all levels of culture.  The animal tales current in Western folklore stem from such sources as the literary fables from India, the Jataka, the medieval Reynard cycle, and the oral traditions of northern Europe, especially of the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania).

The characters in Estonian animal stories are domestic as well as wild animals.