wise exceedingly--and
they go forth.

But before Paul can go too, he has a thing or two to say, which he must
not forget, about the wild mysterious north from which his forefathers
came. First how, in those very extreme parts of Germany, in a cave on
the ocean shore, lie the seven sleepers. How they got thither from
Ephesus, I cannot tell, still less how they should be at once there on
the Baltic shore, and at Ephesus--as Mohammed himself believed, and
Edward the Confessor taught--and at Marmoutier by Tours, and probably
elsewhere beside. Be that as it may, there they are, the seven martyrs,
sleeping for ever in their Roman dresses, which some wild fellow tried to
pull off once, and had his arms withered as a punishment. And Paul
trusts that they will awake some day, and by their preaching save the
souls of the heathen Wends and Finns who haunt those parts.

The Teutonic knights, however, and not the seven sleepers, did that 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 {158}. 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
Scrit