which was already built before Saint Olof first gave the baptism here in Viken. You owned old silver vessels and great drinking-horns, which passed from man to man, filled with mead.” 

 Again Berg Rese had to look at the boy. He sat up with his legs hanging out of the bed and his head resting on his hands, with which he at the same time held back the wild masses of hair which would fall over his eyes. His face had become pale and delicate from the ravages of sickness. In his eyes fever still burned. He smiled at the pictures he conjured up: at the adorned house, at the silver vessels, at the guests in gala array and at Berg Rese, sitting in the seat of honor in the hall of his ancestors. The peasant thought that no one had ever looked at him with such shining, admiring eyes, or thought him so magnificent, arrayed in his festival clothes, as that boy thought him in the torn skin dress. 

 He was both touched and provoked. That miserable thief had no right to admire him. 

 “Were there no feasts in your house?” he asked. 

 Tord laughed. “Out there on the rocks with father and mother! Father is a wrecker and mother is a witch. No one will come to us.” 

 “Is your mother a witch?” 

 “She is,” answered Tord, quite untroubled. “In stormy weather she rides out on a seal to meet the ships over which the waves are washing, and those who are carried overboard are hers.” 

 “What does she do with them?” asked Berg. 

 “Oh, a witch always needs corpses. She makes ointments out of them, or perhaps she eats them. On moonlight nights she sits in the surf, where it is whitest, and the spray dashes over her. They say that she sits and searches for shipwrecked children’s fingers and eyes.” 

 “That is awful,” said Berg. 

 The boy answered with infinite assurance: “That would be awful in others, but not in witches. They have to do so.” 

 Berg Rese found that he had here come upon a new way of regarding the world and things. 

 “Do thieves have to steal, as witches have to use witchcraft?” he asked sharply. 

 “Yes, of course,” answered the boy; “every one has to do what he is destined to do.” But then he added, with a cautious smile: “There are thieves also who have never stolen.” 

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