Mile after mile they sailed, between bleak
cliffs ice-crowned and garbed in black lichens; mile after mile further
yet, without passing anything more cheerful than a cluster of rocky
islands or a slope covered with brownish moss. The most luxuriant of the
islands boasted only a patch of crowberry bushes or a few creeping
junipers too much abashed to lift their heads a finger's length above
the earth.

Alwin looked about him with a sigh, and then at Sigurd with a grimace.
"Do you still say that this is pleasanter than drowning?" he inquired.

Sigurd met the fling with obstinate composure. "Are you blind to the
greenness of yonder plain? And do you not feel the sun upon you?"

All at once it occurred to Alwin that the icy wind of the headlands had
ceased to blow; the fog had vanished, and there was a genial warmth in
the air about him. And yonder,--certainly yonder meadow was as green as
the camp in Norway. He threw off one of his cloaks and settled himself
to watch.

Gradually the green patches became more numerous, until the level was
covered with nothing else. In one place, he almost thought he caught a
gleam of golden buttercups. The verdure crept up the snow-clad slopes,
hundreds and thousands of feet; and here and there, beside some foaming
little cataract tumbling down from a glacier-fed stream, a rhododendron
glowed like a rosy flame. They passed the last island, covered with a
copse of willows as high as a tall man's head, and came into an open
stretch of water bordered by rolling pasture lands, filled with daisies
and mild-eyed cattle. Sigurd clutched the English boy's arm excitedly.

"Yonder are Eric's ship-sheds! And there--over that hill, where the
smoke is rising--there is Brattahlid!"

"There?" exclaimed Alwin. "Now it was in my mind that you had told me
that Eric's house was built on Eric's Fiord."

"So it is,--or two miles from there, which is of little importance. Oh,
yes, it stands on the very banks of Einar's Fiord; but since that is a
route one takes only when he visits the other parts of the settlement,
and seldom when he runs out to sea--Is that a man I see upon the
landing?"

"If they have not already seen us and come down to meet us, their eyes
are less sharp than they were wont to be three years ago," Rolf began;
when Sigurd answered his own question.

"They are there; do you not see? Crowds of them--between the sheds.
Someone is waving a cloak. By Saint Michael, the sight of Normandy