“Are there sixteen?” she asked innocently.

“Ay.”

“Ay, well, then.”

“A nice one to count, you are.”

Oline answered quietly, in an injured tone, “Since all the goats are there, why, then, thank Heaven, you can’t say Oline’s been eating them up.  And well for her, poor thing.”

Oline had taken him in completely with her trickery; he was content, imagining all was well.  It did not occur to him, for instance, to count the sheep.  He did not trouble about further counting of the stock at all.  After all, Oline was not as bad as she might have been; she kept house for him after a fashion, and looked to his cattle; she was merely a fool, and that was worst for herself.  Let her stay, let her live—­she was not worth troubling about.  But it was a grey and joyless thing to be Isak, as life was now.

Years had passed.  Grass had grown on the roof of the house, even the roof of the barn, which was some years younger, was green.  The wild mouse, native of the woods, had long since found way into the storehouse.  Tits and all manner of little birds swarmed about the place; there were more birds up on the hillside; even the crows had come.  And most wonderful of all, the summer before, seagulls had appeared, seagulls coming all the way up from the coast to settle on the fields there in the wilderness.  Isak’s farm was known far and wide to all wild creatures.  And what of Eleseus and little Sivert when they saw the gulls?  Oh, ’twas some strange birds from ever so far away; not so many of them, just six white birds, all exactly alike, waddling this way and that about the fields, and pecking at the grass now and then.

“Father, what have they come for?” asked the boys.

“There’s foul weather coming out at sea,” said their father.  Oh, a grand and mysterious thing to see those gulls!

And Isak taught his sons many other things good and useful to know.  They were of an age to go to school, but the school was many miles away down in the village, out of reach.  Isak had himself taught the boys their A B C on Sundays, but ’twas not for him, not for this born tiller of the soil, to give them any manner of higher education; the Catechism and Bible history lay quietly on the shelf with the cheeses.  Isak apparently thought it better for men to grow up without book-knowledge, from the way he dealt with his boys.  They were a joy and a blessing to him, the two; many a time he thought of the days when they had been tiny things, and their mother would not let him touch them because his hands were sticky with resin.  Ho, resin, the cleanest thing in the world!  Tar and goats’ milk and marrow, for instance, all excellent things, but resin, clean gum from the fir—­not a word!

So the lads grew up in a paradise of dirt and ignorance, but they were nice lads for all that when they were washed, which happened now and again; little Sivert he was a splendid fellow, though Eleseus was something finer and deeper.