between the rocky walls of the fjord. It churns the water to a froth
of rushing wave crests, while the boats along the beach are flung in
somersaults up to the doors of the grey fisher huts, and solid old barn
gangways are lifted and sent flying like unwieldy birds over the fields.
"Mercy on us!" cry the maids, for it is milking-time, and they have
to fight their way on hands and knees across the yard to the cowshed,
dragging a lantern that WILL go out and a milk-pail that WON'T be held.
And "Lord preserve us!" mutter the old wives seated round the stove
within doors--and their thoughts are far away in the north with the
Lofoten fishermen, out at sea, maybe, this very night.

But on a calm spring day, the fjord just steals in smooth and shining
by ness and bay. And at low water there is a whole wonderland of strange
little islands, sand-banks, and weed-fringed rocks left high and dry,
with clear pools between, where bare-legged urchins splash about, and
tiny flat-fish as big as a halfpenny dart away to every side. The air is
filled with a smell of salt sea-water and warm, wet beach-waste, and
the sea-pie, see-sawing about on a big stone in the water, lifts his red
beak cheerily sunwards and pipes: "Kluip, kluip! the spring has come!"

On just such a day, two boys of fourteen or thereabouts came hurrying
out from one of the fishermen's huts down towards the beach. Boys
are never so busy as when they are up to some piece of mischief, and
evidently the pair had business of this sort in hand. Peer Troen,
fair-haired and sallow-faced, was pushing a wheelbarrow; his companion,
Martin Bruvold, a dark youth with freckles, carried a tub. And both
talked mysteriously in whispers, casting anxious glances out over the
water.

Peer Troen was, of course, the ringleader. That he always was: the