good work.

Only their dog is not with them, it appears;--the sacred dog which
watches them till the judgment day, when it is to go up to heaven,
with Noah's dove, and Balaam's ass, and Alborah the camel, and all
the holy beasts. The dog must have been left behind at Ephesus.

Then he must tell us about the Scritofinns of the Bothnia gulf; wild
Lapps and Finns, who have now retreated before the Teutonic race. In
Paul Warnefrid's eyes they are little wild hopping creatures--whence
they derive their name, he says--Scritofinns, the hopping, or
scrambling Finns.

Scrattels, Skretles, often figure in the Norse tales as hopping
dwarfs, half magical {p158}. The Norse discoverers of America
recognized the Skraellings in the Esquimaux, and fled from them in
panic terror; till that furious virago Freydisa, Thorvard's wife, and
Eirek the Red's daughter, caught up a dead man's sword, and put to
flight, single-handed, the legion of little imps.

Others, wiser, or too wise, say that Paul is wrong; that Skrikfins is
the right name, so called from their 'screeking', screaming, and
jabbering, which doubtless the little fellows did, loudly enough.

Be that as it may, they appear to Paul (or rather to his informants,
Wendish merchants probably, who came down to Charlemagne's court at
Aix, to sell their amber and their furs) as hopping about, he says,
after the rein-deer, shooting them with a little clumsy bow, and
arrows tipt with bone, and dressing themselves in their skins.
Procopius knew these Scritfins too (but he has got (as usual) addled