No councillor that the King consulted could help to win them back again, and no hunter that he sent through the country could gain tale or tidings of them. The King and Queen were left with one child only, the girl just born. They called her “Sheen,” a word that means “Storm,” because her coming was a storm that swept away her seven brothers. The Queen died, my hearers. Then little Sheen was forgotten by her father, and she was reared and companioned by the servants of the house. One day, when she was the age her eldest brother was when he was changed from his human form, Sheen went with Mor, the Woodman’s daughter, and Siav, the basket-maker’s foster-child, to gather berries in the wood. Going here and there she got separated from Siav and Mor. She came to a place where there were lots of berries and went step after step to pick them. Her feet went down in a marsh. She cried to Mor and Siav, but no answers came from them. She cried and cried again. Her cries startled seven wild geese that rose up and flew round her. “Save me,” she cried to them. Then one of the wild geese spoke to her. “Anyone but a girl we would save from the marsh, but such a one we cannot save, because it was a girl who lost us our human forms and the loving companionship of our father.” Then Sheen knew--for the servants had often told her the story--that it was one of her seven brothers who spoke. “Since ever I knew of it,” said she, “the whole of my trouble has been that I was the cause of your losing your human form and the companionship of our father who is now called the Lonely King. Believe me,” said she, “that I would have striven and striven to win you back.” There was so much feeling in her voice that her seven brothers, although they had been hardened by thinking about their misfortune, were touched at their hearts and they flew down to help her. They bore up her arms, they caught at her shoulders, they raised up her feet. They carried her beyond the marsh. Then she knelt down and cried to them, “O my brothers dear, is there anything I can do to restore you to your human forms?” “There is,” said the first of the seven wild geese. She begged them to tell it to her. “It’s a long and a tiresome labor we would put on you,” said one. “If you would gather the light down that grows on the bogs with your own hands,” said another, “and if you spun that down into threads, and wove the threads into a cloth and sewed the cloth into a shirt, and did that over and over again until you had made seven shirts for us, all that time without laughing or crying or saying a word, you could save us. One shirt you could weave and spin and sew in a year. And it would not be until the seven shirts were put upon us that the human form would be restored to each of us.” “I would be glad to do all that,” said Sheen, “and I would cry no tear, laugh no laugh, and say no word all the time I was doing this task.”