Wealthy old Misule would naturally have nothing to say to such a match; he had in his eye an influential friend of his, a gentleman and village elder in the county of Fehervar, one Gligor Tobicza,--to him he meant to give his daughter.
Reports were spread that Juon was a wizard.

It was Misule's wife who fastened this suspicion upon him, because he had succeeded in bewitching her daughter.

She said among other things, that he understood the language of the brute beasts, that he had often been seen speaking with wolves and bears, and that when he spread out his shaggy sheepskin, he sat down at one end of it and a bear at the other.

There was this much of truth in the tale, that once when he was tending his flocks Juon heard a painful groaning in the hollow of a rock, and, venturing in, perceived lying in one corner a she-bear who, mortally injured in some distant hunt, had contrived to drag its lacerated body hither to die.
Beside the old she-bear lay a little suckling cub.

The mother dying before his very eyes, Juon had compassion on the desolate cub, took it under his protection, and carried it to a milch-goat, who suckled it.
The little wild beast thrived upon the milk of the tame animal and, softened by human fellowship, grew up much attached to its master.
Bears, I may tell your ladyship, are not bloodthirsty by nature.
Henceforth the bear went forth with the herdsman and the herds, helped to drive the goats together of an evening, and enlivened the long dreary days by turning somersaults--an art at which bears excel.