y on the strand. She wept
as if her heart would break, and dried her face with her hair in
impetuous Finnish fashion. Eilert laughed at her as boys will, but he
overdid it, and was very pale the whole time. He dared not tell her that
that very day he had taken a random shot with his father's gun from
behind the headland at a bird a long way off which was swimming ashore.

One autumn Eilert's father was downright desperate. Day after day on the
fishing grounds his lines caught next to nothing, while he was forced to
look on and see the Finn pull up one rich catch after another. He was
sure, too, that he had noticed malicious gestures over in the Finn's
boat. After that his whole house nourished a double bitterness against
them; and when they talked it over in the evening, it was agreed, as a
thing beyond all question, that Finnish sorcery had something to do with
it. Against this there was only one remedy, and that was to rub
corpse-mould on the lines; but one must beware of doing so, lest one
should thereby offend the dead, and expose oneself to their vengeance,
while the sea-folk would gain power over one at the same time.

Eilert bothered his head a good deal over all this; it almost seemed to
him as if he had had a share in the deed, because he was on such a good
footing with the Finn folks.

On the following Sunday both he and the Finn folks were at Berg church,
and he secretly abstracted a handful of mould from one of the Finn
graves, and put it in his pocket. The same evening, when they came home,
he strewed the mould over his father's lines unobserved. And, oddly
enough, the very next time his father cast his lines, as many fish were
caught as in the good old times. But after this Eilert's anxiety became
indescribable. He was especially cautions while they were working of an
evening round the fireside, and it was dark in the distant corners of
the room. He sat there with a piece of steel in his pocket. To beg
"forgiveness" of the dead is the only helpful means against the
consequences of such deeds as his, otherwise one will be dragged off at
night, by an invisible hand, to the churchyard, though one were lashed
fast to the bed by a ship's hawser.

When Eilert, on the following "Preaching Sunday," went to church, he
took very good care to go to the grave, and beg forgiveness of the dead.

As Eilert grew older, he got to understand that the Finn folks must,
after all, be pretty much the same sort of people as