g from the cottage, entered
and went to sit at meat. When they were at table, and Kraka's son and
stepson were about to eat together, she put before them a small dish
containing a piebald mess, part looking pitchy, but spotted with specks
of yellow, while part was whitish: the pottage having taken a different
hue answering to the different appearance of the snakes. And when each
had tasted a single morsel, Erik, judging the feast not by the colours
but by the inward strengthening effected, turned the dish around
very quickly, and transferred to himself the part which was black but
compounded of stronger juices; and, putting over to Roller the whitish
part which had first been set before himself, throve more on his supper.
And, to avoid showing that the exchange was made on purpose, he said,
"Thus does prow become stern when the sea boils up." The man had no
little shrewdness, thus to use the ways of a ship to dissemble his
cunning act.

So Erik, now refreshed by this lucky meal, attained by its inward
working to the highest pitch of human wisdom. For the potency of the
meal bred in him the fulness of all kinds of knowledge to an incredible
degree, so that he had cunning to interpret even the utterances of wild
beasts and cattle. For he was not only well versed in all the affairs
of men, but he could interpret the particular feelings which brutes
experienced from the sounds which expressed them. He was also gifted
with an eloquence so courteous and graceful, that he adorned whatsoever
he desired to expound with a flow of witty adages. But when Kraka came
up, and found that the dish had been turned round, and that Erik had
eaten the stronger share of the meal, she lamented that the good luck
she had bred for her son should have passed to her stepson. Soon she
began to sigh, and entreat Eric that he should never fail to help his
brother, whose mother had heaped on him fortune so rich and strange: for
by tasting a single savoury meal he had clearly attained sovereign wit
and eloquence, besides the promise of success in combat. She added also,
that Roller was almost as capable of good counsel, and that he should
not utterly miss the dainty that had been intended for him. She also
told him that in case of extreme and violent need, he could find speedy
help by calling on her name; declaring that she trusted partially in her
divine attributes, and that, consorting as she did in a manner with the
gods, she wielded an innate and