o dig it and others from the
quarry of my past. It is a gift which, although small at first, I have
been able gradually to develop. Therefore, as I wish to hide my present
identity, I will only sign myself

The Editor.

THE WANDERER'S NECKLACE

BOOK I

AAR

CHAPTER I

THE BETROTHAL OF OLAF

Of my childhood in this Olaf life I can regain but little. There come to
me, however, recollections of a house, surrounded by a moat, situated in
a great plain near to seas or inland lakes, on which plain stood mounds
that I connected with the dead. What the dead were I did not quite
understand, but I gathered that they were people who, having once walked
about and been awake, now laid themselves down in a bed of earth and
slept. I remember looking at a big mound which was said to cover a chief
known as "The Wanderer," whom Freydisa, the wise woman, my nurse, told
me had lived hundreds or thousands of years before, and thinking that so
much earth over him must make him very hot at nights.

I remember also that the hall called Aar was a long house roofed with
sods, on which grew grass and sometimes little white flowers, and that
inside of it cows were tied up. We lived in a place beyond, that was
separated off from the cows by balks of rough timber. I used to watch
them being milked through a crack between two of the balks where a
knot had fallen out, leaving a convenient eyehole about the height of a
walking-stick from the floor.

One day my elder and only brother, Ragnar, who had very red hair, came
and pulled me away from this eyehole because he wanted to look through
it himself at a cow that always kicked the girl who milked it. I howled,
and Steinar, my foster-brother, who had light-coloured hair and blue
eyes, and was much bigger and stronger than I, came to my help, because
we always loved each other. He fought Ragnar and made his nose bleed,
after which my mother, the Lady Thora, who was very beautiful, boxed
his ears. Then we all cried, and my father, Thorvald, a tall man, rather
loosely made, who had come in from hunting, for he carried the skin of
some animal of which the blood had run down on to his leggings, scolded
us and told my mother to keep us quiet as he was tired and wanted to
eat.

That is the only scene which returns to me of my infancy.

The next of which a vision has come to me is one of a somewhat similar
house to our own in Aar, upon an island called Lesso, where we were all