y moderately well.
The Nordland boat-builders have long since discovered the high fore and
aft, sharp-keeled boat, to be the most practical, with one mast and a
broad, prettily cut square sail admirably suited to what is most
required, rapid sailing in fore and side winds, though less so for
tacking. The boat is exactly the same shape under water as the
fast-sailing clippers for which the English and Americans have of late
become famed. What it has cost the Nordlanders to perfect the form that
now enables them almost to fly before the wind, away from mighty curling
billows which would bury the boat, if they reached it; how many
generations have suffered and toiled and thought over, and corrected
this shape under pain of death, so to speak, for every mistake made! In
short, the history of the Nordland boat, from the days of men who first
waged war with the ocean up there, to this day is a forgotten Nordland
saga, full of the great achievements of the steadily toiling workman.

One winter's evening in January, a little while before the fishing
began, I heard a story told by a man of one of the large boats' crews
who were then spending the night at our house. He was started by two or
three of Komag-Nils' stories, and wanted to show us that where he came
from, down at Doenoe near Ranen, in Helgeland, there were as many and as
wonderful stories and boats, as with us in Nordland. The narrator was a
little, quick-speaking fellow, who sat the whole time rocking backwards
and forwards, and fidgetting upon the bench, while he talked. With his
sharp nose, and round, reddish little eyes, he resembled a restless
sea-bird on a rock. Every now and then he broke off to dive down into
his provision box, as if every time he did so he took out of it a fresh
piece of his story. The story was as follows:

On Kvalholmen, in Helgeland, there lived a poor fisherman named Elias,
with his wife Karen, who had formerly been servant at the minister's
over at Alstadhaug. They had put up a cottage at Kvalholmen, and Elias
was now in the Lofoten fishing-trade, working for daily wages.

It was pretty evident that lonely Kvalholmen was haunted. When the
husband was away, the wife heard many dismal noises and cries, which
could not come from anything good. One day when she was up on the
mountain, cutting grass for winter fodder for the two or three sheep
they owned, she distinctly heard the sound of talking on the beach
below, but dared not look to see