could through the glass.
She never made a mistake about the craft, large or small, that belonged
to that part of the coast, and could, besides, say to a nicety, what
sort of master each had. Her superiority of sight she asserted, too,
with a tyranny to which he made no resistance, although it might have
tried a temper many degrees more patient than his was.

One day, however, she was at a loss. They made out a crescent on the
flag, and this caused even the old man a moment's astonishment. But he
declared then, for her information, shortly and decisively, that it was
a "barbarian."

This satisfied her for a moment. But then she asked--

"What is a barbarian, grandfather?"

"It is a Turk."

"Yes, but a Turk?"

"Oh! it's--it's--a Mohammedan--"

"A what!--a Moham--"

"A Mohammedan--a robber on board ship."

"On board ship!"

He was not going to give up his ascendancy in the matter, hard as she
pushed him; so he bethought him of a pack of old tales there-anent, and
went on to explain drily--

"They go to the Baltic--to Russia--to salt human flesh."

"Human flesh!"

"Yes, and sometimes, too, they seize vessels in the open sea and do
their salting there."

She fixed a pair of large, terrified eyes on him, which made the old man
continue--

"And it is especially for little girls they look. That meat is the
finest, and goes by tons down to the Grand Turk."

Having played this last trump, he was going in again, but was stopped by
her eager question--

"Do they use a glass there on board?" And when he said they did, she
slipped quickly by him through the door, and kept cautiously within as
long as the vessel was to be seen through the window-pane on the
horizon.

The moods of the two were for once reversed. The old man looked very sly
over his work, whilst she was quiet and cowed. Once only she broke out
angrily--

"But why doesn't the king get rid of them? If I was captain of a
man-of-war, I'd--"

"Yes, Elizabeth, if you were captain of a man-of-war!--what then?"

The child's conceptions apparently reached no further than such matters
as these as yet. She had seen few human beings as she grew up, and in
recent years, after her grandmother's death, she and her grandfather had
been the only regular inhabitants of the island. Every now and then
there might perhaps come a boat on one errand or another, and a couple
of times she had paid a visit to her maternal aunt on land, at Arendal.
Her grandfather h