in moody abstraction.

The chief answered briefly to the murmurs: "It is unadvisable to oppose
my whim for writing in wine; who knows but I might exchange it for a
fancy to write in blood? Bring hither the vadmal, thrall, and we will
lose no more precious moments."

Was ever monkish work begun in more unchurch-like surroundings? Alwin
wondered, a festal board for a desk and a wine-cup for an ink-horn! The
brawling crew along the benches drank and sang and rattled dice in their
nightly carousal; and, in a corner, Lodin wrestled with the well-grown
bear-cub before a circle of cheering spectators. The firelight flickered
over the trophy-laden walls, picking out now a severed paw and now a
grinning skull, until the whole place seemed a ghastly shrine of
savagery.

The warrior-scribe wrote with painful slowness; and more than once, in
trying to catch some of Helga's chatter across the fire, he wrote such
twisted sentences that it was impossible to unravel them when he came to
retranslate. Yet he did write. Ploddingly, haltingly, clumsily, he still
caught the fleeting thoughts as they sped, and fastened them down, in
purple and white, to last so long as one thread should lie beside
another. No longer need anyone torture his brain to remember whether the
tallest maple-trees stood beyond the river's second bend to the left or
its fourth to the right, or between the third turning to the right and
the fifth to the left. The little fox-hair brush sprang upon the fact
and pinioned it, a prisoner for the remainder of time.

The chief's pleasure was almost too great to be controlled. He went at
the work as a starving man goes at food, and he hung over it as a
drunkard hangs over his dram. Tyrker rose with considerable bustle to
take his departure for the other house; and Vaibrand stamped about
noisily as he renewed the torches on the walls; but the monotonous
steadiness of the dictation never faltered. One by one, the men about
Leif dropped off, snoring; and he heeded it no more than he did the
soughing of the wind through the grove. By and by, even the fresh
torches began to snore, in angry sputters; and the fire, which had long
since begun to wink drowsily, shut its last red eye and lay in total
oblivion.

Leif sat up reluctantly, and stretched his arms over his head with a
regretful sigh. "My mind comes out of it as stubbornly as Sigmund's
sword came out of the tree trunk. We will return to it the first thing
in the morning