row, lying in wait
for dog-fish.

But there was a time when one knew the exact number of these birds.
There was never more nor less of them than twelve, while upon a stone,
out in the sea-mist, sat the thirteenth, but it was only visible when it
rose and flew right over the island.

The only persons who lived near the Vaer[1] at winter time, long after
the fishing season was over, was a woman and a slip of a girl. Their
business was to guard the scaffolding poles for drying fish against the
birds of prey, who had such a villainous trick of hacking at the
drying-ropes.

The young girl had thick coal-black hair, and a pair of eyes that peeped
at folk so oddly. One might almost have said that she was like the
cormorants outside there, and she had never seen much else all her life.
Nobody knew who her father was.

Thus they lived till the girl had grown up.

It was found that, in the summer time, when the fishermen went out to
the Vaer to fetch away the dried fish, that the young fellows began
underbidding each other, so as to be selected for that special errand.

Some gave up their share of profits, and others their wages; and there
was a general complaint in all the villages round about that on such
occasions no end of betrothals were broken off.

But the cause of it all was the girl out yonder with the odd eyes.

For all her rough and ready ways, she had something about her, said
those she chatted with, that there was no resisting. She turned the
heads of all the young fellows; it seemed as if they couldn't live
without her.

The first winter a lad wooed her who had both house and warehouse of his
own.

"If you come again in the summer time, and give me the right gold ring I
will be wedded by, something may come of it," said she.

And, sure enough, in the summer time the lad was there again.

He had a lot of fish to fetch away, and she might have had a gold ring
as heavy and as bonnie as heart could wish for.

"The ring I must have lies beneath the wreckage, in the iron chest, over
at the island yonder," said she; "that is, if you love me enough to dare
fetch it."

But then the lad grew pale.

He saw the sea-bore rise and fall out there like a white wall of foam on
the bright warm summer day, and on the island sat the cormorants
sleeping in the sunshine.

"Dearly do I love thee," said he, "but such a quest as that would mean
my burial, not my bridal."

The same instant the thirteenth cormorant ros