“Say out what you mean,” said Berg. 

 The boy continued with his mysterious smile, proud at being an unsolvable riddle: “It is like speaking of birds who do not fly, to talk of thieves who do not steal.” 

 Berg Rese pretended to be stupid in order to find out what he wanted. “No one can be called a thief without having stolen,” he said. 

 “No; but,” said the boy, and pressed his lips together as if to keep in the words, “but if some one had a father who stole,” he hinted after a while. 

 “One inherits money and lands,” replied Berg Rese, “but no one bears the name of thief if he has not himself earned it.” 

 Tord laughed quietly. “But if somebody has a mother who begs and prays him to take his father’s crime on him. But if such a one cheats the hangman and escapes to the woods. But if some one is made an outlaw for a fish-net which he has never seen.” 

 Berg Rese struck the stone table with his clenched fist. He was angry. This fair young man had thrown away his whole life. He could never win love, nor riches, nor esteem after that. The wretched striving for food and clothes was all which was left him. And the fool had let him, Berg Rese, go on despising one who was innocent. He rebuked him with stern words, but Tord was not even as afraid as a sick child is of its mother, when she chides it because it has caught cold by wading in the spring brooks. 

 On one of the broad, wooded mountains lay a dark tarn. It was square, with as straight shores and as sharp corners as if it had been cut by the hand of man. On three sides it was surrounded by steep cliffs, on which pines clung with roots as thick as a man’s arm. Down by the pool, where the earth had been gradually washed away, their roots stood up out of the water, bare and crooked and wonderfully twisted about one another. It was like an infinite number of serpents which had wanted all at the same time to crawl up out of the pool but had got entangled in one another and been held fast. Or it was like a mass of blackened skeletons of drowned giants which the pool wanted to throw up on the land. Arms and legs writhed about one another, the long fingers dug deep into the very cliff to get a hold, the mighty ribs formed arches, which held up primeval trees. It had happened, however, that the iron arms, the steel-like fingers with which the pines held themselves fast, had given way, and a pine had been borne by a mighty north wind from the top of the cliff down into the pool. 

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