es, to which sorrow and care
appeared to be strangers. He was not only fat, but sleepy and lazy as
well; and therefore the house work, cooking and baking, and repairing
of nets for the capture of fish for their own table and for the market,
devolved on him, as well as a large part of the cultivation of the
small field attached to their cabin. Quite the opposite was his
companion--tall and lank, with Roman nose and keen eyes; he was known
as the most industrious and luckiest fisherman, the most daring
cliff-climber after birds and down, the hardest field worker, on the
whole island. Besides all this, he was considered the keenest trader on
the Kirkwall market; but as his wares were good, and his transactions
above reproach, every one dealt willingly with him. Thus William Falcon
and Kaspar Strumpf--with whom the former, avaricious as he was, freely
divided his hardly-earned gains--not only made a good living, but were
in a fair way of acquiring a certain degree of wealth. But a competence
would not satisfy Falcon's covetous soul; he wanted to be rich,
extremely rich, and as he had already found out that riches accumulate
but slowly in the usual course of industry, he at last settled into the
conviction that he should have to attain his riches through some
extraordinary stroke of fortune. When this idea had once taken
possession of his mind, there was no room left for any thing else, and
he began to talk this shadowy windfall over with Kaspar Strumpf, as
though it had already come to pass. Kaspar, who received everything
that Falcon said as scripture, repeated all this to his neighbors: and
so the report was spread abroad that William Falcon had either sold his
soul to the evil one, or had at least received an offer for it from the
prince of the infernal regions.

At first, these reports caused much amusement to Falcon; but gradually
he began to entertain the notion that a spirit might sometime reveal a
treasure to him, and he no longer contradicted his acquaintances when
they twitted him on the subject. He continued his usual occupations,
but with far less zeal than before, and often consumed a great part of
the time, that he had formerly passed in fishing or other useful
avocations, in idle search for some kind of an adventure by which he
should suddenly become rich. To still further complete this unfortunate
tendency of his mind, it happened that as he was standing one day on
the lonely sea-shore, looking out on the re