th me up and down the end of the hall.

"Old Father Cefron," he began, "is a learned man, but a man who has kept
too strictly within the rules of his order; he lacks blood, therefore he
lacks heart; he has only a head, but that head is one whose like will
not be seen in Skandinavia again in this century"; and the youth's voice
was touched with enthusiasm. "Now why it is I do not know, but having
killed the man in him over ponderous books, he feels he must have me to
put some laughter in his life, and give him something human to think of
for the moment when he is tired of the battles and treaties and that of
dead kings; therefore it is, my lord and host, that I would venture to
ask of you as Father Cefron has asked me to ask of you--indeed has
commanded--that you let me stay with him here in the castle till the term
of his life is ended, which seems not very long."

So young Heinrick became one of my household, and though I never liked
him for his dainty ways and foreign prettinesses, yet I became used to
him, and his figure was familiar on the edges of my fish-ponds, in the
corridors of my hall, and was seldom absent when the time for eating
came. He seemed to be much with Father Cefron in the early evening, and
I could hear Father Cefron's groans come from his chamber sometimes when
I passed by the door; and he was good at wrestling tricks, and quick to
a wonder at southern fence, yet I liked him none the better, and I could
see that the men liked him neither, for they would not learn his
wrestling tricks till pressed almost to command, and I could see them
whispering and glancing after him as he passed by. By this time my Lady
Elsa and myself lived as most loving people. I would take her to the
fish-ponds, and she would scream and find delight in the excitement; or
sometimes she would come to meet me through the wood with some of her
women and some men to follow, and I would come making the wood hoarsely
musical through my curved horn, and bring her deer from the uplands and
great hares shot with cross-bow, and sometimes little birds, very hard
to come near, which dwell among the sand-hills to the westward; then she
would always have flowers in her room; in the winter evergreens and the
mystical, bunched, mistletoe, and ever my favourite meats and green
things, cooked or wild, all the year were before me.

It was as the winter came on that I fell ill and the fever came into me;
and after lying for three days I tried