happens when death is at hand, and his skin was chafed off his hands
from holding on to the keel. The son understood now that his father was
nearly at the last gasp, and tried, so far as the pitching and tossing
would allow it, to hold him up; but when Elias marked it, he said, "Nay,
look to thyself, Bernt, and hold on fast. I go to mother--in Jesus'
Name!" and with that he cast himself down headlong from the top of the
boat.

Every one who has sat on the keel of a boat long enough knows that when
the sea has got its own it grows much calmer, though not immediately.
Bernt now found it easier to hold on, and still more of hope came to him
with the brightening day. The storm abated, and, when it got quite
light, it seemed to him that he knew where he was, and that it was
outside his own homestead, Kvalholm, that he lay driving.

He now began again to cry for help, but his chief hope was in a current
which he knew bore landwards at a place where a headland broke in upon
the surge, and there the water was calmer. And he did, in fact, drive
closer and closer in, and came at last so near to one of the rocks that
the mast, which was floating by the side of the boat all the time,
surged up and down in the swell against the sloping cliff. Stiff as he
now was in all his limbs from sitting and holding on, he nevertheless
succeeded, after a great effort, in clambering up the cliff, where he
hauled the mast ashore, and made the _Femböring_ fast.

The Finn girl, who was alone in the house, had been thinking, for the
last two hours, that she had heard cries for help from time to time, and
as they kept on she mounted the hill to see what it was. There she saw
Bernt up on the cliff, and the overturned _Femböring_ bobbing up and
down against it. She immediately dashed down to the boat-place, got out