ith its wooden feet in the sea. Altogether a
strange capital. In the month of Althing GORGON took his daughter to
Thingummy-vellir, where there were wrestling matches. It came to the
turn of PATRICKSEN and STIFFUN. STIFFUN took him with one arm; then,
curling one leg round his head and winding the other round his waist,
he planted his head in his chest, and crushing his ribs with one hand
he gave a mighty heave, and clasping the ground, as with the hoofs of
an ox, he flung him some two hundred yards away, and went and married
RACHEL the Governor's daughter. That night he broke PATRICKSEN's back,
as if he had been a stick of sugar-candy. After this he took his wife
home, and often beat her, or set his mother on her. But one day she
happened to mention PATRICKSEN, so he fled, cowed, humiliated, cap
in hand, to Manxland, but left to her her child, her liberator, her
FASON, so that she might span her little world of shame and pain on
the bridge of Hope's own rainbow. She did this every day, and no one
in all Iceland, rugged, hungry, cold Iceland, knew how she did it. It
was a pretty trick.

CHAPTER II.

This is the Isle of Man, the island of MATT MYLCHREEST, and NARY
CROWE, but plenty of vultures, the island of Deemsters, and Keys,
and Kirk Maughold, and Port y Vullin. Here at the Lague lived ADAM
FATSISTER, the Deputy Governor, who had been selected for that post
because he owned five hundred hungry acres, six hungrier sons, a face
like an angel's in homespun, a flaccid figure, and a shrewd-faced
wife, named RUTH. Hither came STIFFUN, to beg shelter. The footman
opened the door to him, but would have closed it had not ADAM, with a
lusty old oath, bidden him to let the man in. Hereupon STIFFUN's face
softened, and the footman's dropped; but ORRORS, with an Icelander's
inborn courtesy, picked it up, dusted it, and returned it to its
owner. Shortly afterwards, STIFFUN became a bigamist and a wrecker,
and had another son, whom, in honour of the Manxland Parliament, he
christened MICHAEL MOONKEYS, and left him to be cared for by old
ADAM, whose daughter's name was GREEBA. STIFFUN, as I have said, was
a wrecker, a wrecker on strictly Homeric principles, but a wrecker,
nevertheless. When storm-winds blew, he was a pitcher and tosser
on the ocean, but, like other pitchers, he went to the bad once too
often, and got broken on the rocks. Then came KANE WADE, and CHALSE,
and MYLCHREEST, and they sang hymns to him.

"Ye've not liv