ollect. We do not forget our duty;
we pay our rent every year--a feather, an egg, and a young one--as we
ought to do. Dost thou think that when _she_ is outside _I_ can
venture to go below, as in former days, or as I do in Egypt, where I
am almost everybody's comrade, not to mention that I can there even
peep into the pots and pans without any fear? No; I sit up here and
fret myself about her--the hussy! and I fret myself at thee too. Thou
shouldst have left her lying in the water-lily, and there would have
been an end of her."

"Thy words are much harder than thy heart," said the stork-father. "I
know thee better than thou knowest thyself."

And then he made a hop, flapped his wings twice, stretched his legs
out behind him, and away he flew, or rather sailed, without moving his
wings, until he had got to some distance. Then he brought his wings
into play; the sun shone upon his white feathers; he stretched his
head and his neck forward, and hastened on his way.

"He is, nevertheless, still the handsomest of them all," said his
admiring mate; "but I will not tell him that."

* * * * *

Late that autumn the Viking returned home, bringing with him booty and
prisoners. Among these was a young Christian priest, one of the men
who denounced the gods of the Northern mythology. Often about this
time was the new religion talked of in baronial halls and ladies'
bowers--the religion that was spreading over all lands of the south,
and which, with the holy Ansgarius,[2] had even reached as far as
Hedeby. Even little Helga had heard of the pure religion of Christ,
who, from love to mankind, had given himself as a sacrifice to save
them; but with her it went in at one ear and out at the other, to use
a common saying. The word _love_ alone seemed to have made some
impression upon her, when she shrunk into the miserable form of a frog
in the closed-up chamber. But the Viking's wife had listened to, and
felt herself wonderfully affected by, the rumour and the Saga about
the Son of the one only true God.

[Footnote 2: Ansgarius was originally a monk from the monastery of New
Corbie, in Saxony, to which several of the monks of Corbie in France
had migrated in A.D. 822. Its abbot, Paschasius Radbert, who died in
865, was, according to Cardinal Bellarmine, the first fully to
propagate the belief, now entertained in the Roman Catholic Church, of
the corporeal presence of the Saviour in the sacrament. Ans