curving prow, and now and then jetted high enough to come hissing
inboard on the wind when the fitful gusts shifted to the rightabout.
The men laughed, and carelessly shook the drops from their broad backs
when it splashed among them.

What a hardy set of men they were, those Northmen of old! They had no
compass; they must steer by the sun, or by the stars, guess at their
rate of sailing and tell by that how many more days distant was their
destination. If the weather was fine, well. But if the sky clouded
over, and sun nor star was seen for a week or more, while the wind
veered at its own will, the chances were more than even that they
would bring up on some coast where they had never been, with water and
food to get, and perhaps every headland bristling with hostile spears.
All this they knew, yet out to sea they went as happily as a fisherman
seeks his nets. Trading, starving, fighting, plundering,--it was all
one to them. On the whole, they seemed to like fighting the best of
all, since that is what their sagas told most about.

But Ulf was not by birth a Northman. Yet a rover by nature was he, and
chief of all things that he most desired was to explore strange lands,
and especially what lay beyond where the sky dipped downward and
seemed to meet the sea. Ships came from thence, now and then; ships
had gone thence, as he knew, and some had never come back, but perhaps
were sailing still from land to land, through the great unknown.

For weeks his ship sailed onward, over a lonely ocean. Now and then
the misty fountain sprung upward from the waves where a whale was
"blowing," with gulls hovering in the air above his glistening black
back. There were more gulls then than now, and more whales also, and
often the men would finger their lances wistfully and look with