The genie opened his great mouth and roared with anger; then he stooped down over the hut, and I saw that he was breathing fire upon the roof from his nostrils; and as the sparks caught in the dry thatch, he began to walk around the hut, bending and breathing fire upon its roof from place to place. In a few moments it was ablaze from end to end; the walls caught; and as I held my fair lady trembling close beside me, the house arose in flames, crackling and roaring, and showering sparks upward into the twilight sky. “Oh!” said my fair one, clinging to my arm. “The poor witch! Save her! She will be burned to death!” But the genie’s thunderous laugh was her only answer. We watched until the fire was out, and there remained only a heap of smoking ashes; and the witch was gone. “Oh, the poor thing!” said my beautiful lady. “Isn’t it terrible?” said her nine sisters, among themselves. “It’s just too terrible for anything! It _is_ terrible, isn’t it? It’s simply terrible, it is, isn’t it?” The one-armed youth stepped up to the ruin and appeared to be looking among the ashes near what was once the door. He looked for a long time, and then he suddenly straightened up and cried, “Ah!” He came toward us, and he was holding up in his hand what seemed to be a necklace. “See!” he said, and I saw that it was a string of buttons, of large flat buttons, eleven of them, threaded on what seemed to be a hair; the same I had seen about the witch’s neck. “It is the genie’s hair,” said the young man, “the same that she stole from me; and it was this hair which gave her power to turn my genie to a dog and imprison me in the wasp’s nest. Now let me see these buttons; I must look at them with care.” He examined each one minutely; and when he had examined them all, he placed his finger on his lips and smiled knowingly; and while I held the hair he broke it and slipped off the eleventh button, inviting me to look at it closely. I looked and saw upon it, near the rim, a crooked black line, much like the imprint of a tiny, crooked stick. _The One-Armed Sorcerer Performs Upon a Button_ He threw the button upon the ground, laughing, and took from within his gown a leather pouch, from which he sprinkled upon the button a black powder; and then he began to speak, in a loud voice, words which I could not understand, in the midst of which he picked up the button, now crusted with black; and still repeating his strange words, he swung his arm, and with a loud cry flung the button into the branches of the nearest tree; and there, hanging on to a branch of the tree, trying desperately to keep from toppling off, was the old witch herself. Instantly the young man took the threaded buttons from me and slipped them off the hair; he wound the hair about his finger and cried,-- “Off with her! Off with her to the Forest Kingdom, far from here, and see that she never comes back again! Off with her, I say, to the Kingdom of the Great Forest!”