s, and how to make bows and arrows and moccasins."

"Moccasins?"

"The little shoes she made for Ellida. And she made a little boat for
Peder, like their skiffs."

This was interesting. For a private reason, Thorolf held Greenland to be
the most fascinating of all places.

"Can she speak their language?"

"Of course. I asked her to teach me, and she said that perhaps she would
some day. The songs that she sings to the little ones are some that the
Skroeling woman who adopted her used to sing to her when she cried for
her own mother. One of them begins like this:

"'Piche Klooskap pechian
Machieswi menikok.'"

"What does it mean?"

"'Long ago Klooskap came to the island of the partridges.' Klooskap was
like Odin, or Thor. The priests in Greenland told her he was a devil and
wouldn't let her talk about him, but the Skroelings had runes for
everything just like the people in the sagas,--runes for war, and
healing, and the sea."

"How did she ever get away?"

"Some men came from Westbyrg to cut wood in the forest, and when they
saw that she was not really a Skroeling they bought her for an iron pot
and one of them married her. But he was drowned a long time ago."

"I wish I knew the Skroelings' language. Some day I mean to go to
Greenland."

"Perhaps Mother Elle will teach you. I'll ask her."

The Wind-wife was rather chary of information about the country of the
Skroelings until Nikolina's coaxing and Thorolf's silent but intense
interest had taken effect. The country, she said, was rather like
Norway, with mountains and great forests, lakes and streams, but far
colder. There were no fiords, and no cities. The people lived in tents
made of poles covered with bark, or hides. They dressed in the hides of
wild animals and lived by hunting and fishing. They had no reindeer,
horses, cattle, sheep or goats, no fowls, no pigs. They could not work
iron, nor did they spin or weave. The man and woman who had adopted her
treated her just like their own child.

The stories she had learned from these people were intensely interesting
to her listeners. There was one about a battle between the wasps and the
squirrels, and another about the beaver who wanted wings. One was about
a girl who was married to the Spirit of the Mountain and had a son
beautiful and straight and like any other boy except that he had stone
eyebrows. Then there was the tale about Klooskap tying up the White
Eagle of the Wind so that he co