as
though he wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in
his brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain
worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he knew
where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first appeared
unto them, never doubted its high origin.

Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he
was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its
self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not afraid
of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects before him
when his father went down off the North Cape in the long Arctic night,
and his mother, seized by a violent horror of seafaring life, had
followed her brother to America. Eric was eighteen then, handsome as
young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with a skin singularly pure and
delicate, like a Swede's; hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson's
amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most
dangerous to women.

He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of
approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even said
of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to levity, a
vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of those Norwegian
exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a scorching sun, had
repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation had sobered him, and
he grew more and more like the clods among which he laboured. It was as
though some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate
fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which
lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away.
It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those
Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive,
quite hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change
comes almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with
others it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man's
heart to die.

Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year before
they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy hill where
exiles of all nations grow akin.

The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his people
sooner or later succumb had not