"carry
the matter."

"O grandfather, what a mind that fellow has! he will go crazy with
horror soon. I am not sure that he is not crazy now."

"He has murdered Rolf, has he?"

"I can't be sure, but the oddest thing is that he mixes up wolves with
his rambling talk. Rolf can hardly have met with mischief from any wolf
at this season."

"No, boy; not Rolf. But did not. Hund speak of orphan children, and
how wolves have been known to devour them when snow was on the ground?"

"Why, yes," said Oddo, surprised at such a guess.

"There was a reason for Hund's talking so of wolves, my dear. Tell me
quick what he said of Rolf, and what made him say anything to you,--to
an inquisitive boy like you."

"He is like one bewitched, that cannot hold his tongue. While I was
bringing the troughs, one by one, for him to lay, where the meadow was
dryest, he still kept muttering and muttering to himself. As often as I
came within six yards of him, I heard him mutter, mutter; then, when I
helped him to lay the troughs, he began to talk to me. I was not in the
mind to make him many answers, but on he went, just the same as if I had
asked him a hundred questions."

"It was such an opportunity for a curious boy, that I wonder you did
not."

"Perhaps I might, if he had stopped long enough. But if he stopped for
a moment to wipe his brows, he began again before I could well speak.
He asked me whether I had ever heard that drowned men could show their
heads above water, and stare with their eyes, and throw their arms
about, a whole day,--two days, after they were drowned."

"Ay! indeed! Did he ask that?"

"Yes, and several other things: he asked whether I had ever heard that
the islets in the fiord were so many prison-houses."

"And what did you say?"

"I wanted him to explain; so I said they were prison-houses to the
eider-ducks when they were sitting, for they never stir a yard from
their nests. But he did not heed a word I spoke; he went on about
drowned men being kept prisoners in the islets, moaning because they
can't get out. And he says they will knock, knock, as if they could
cleave the thick hard rock."

"What do you think of all this, my boy?"

"Why, when I said I had not heard a word of any such thing, even from my
grandmother or Erica, he declared he had heard the moans himself,--
moaning and crying; but then he mixed up something about the barking of
wolves that made confusion in the story. Though he