Nor could our screaming little guides.  They stood mute; and when they again began with their explanations and stories, they did not come far, for an old gentleman whom none of us had noticed (but he was now amongst us), made himself heard above the noise, with his singularly sounding voice.  He knew all the particulars about the place, and about former days, as if they had been of yesterday.

“Here, on the rocky holms,” said he, “it was that the warriors in the heathen times, as they are called, decided their disputes.  The warrior Staerkodder dwelt in this district, and liked the pretty girl Ogn right well; but she was fonder of Hergrimmer, and therefore he was challenged by Staerkodder to combat here by the falls, and met his death; but Ogn sprung towards them, took her bridegroom’s bloody sword, and thrust it into her own heart.  Thus Staerkodder did not gain her.  Then there passed a hundred years, and again a hundred years:  the forests were then thick and closely grown; wolves and bears prowled here summer and winter; the place was infested with malignant robbers, whose hiding-place no one could find.  It was yonder, by the fall before Top Island, on the Norwegian side—­there was their cave:  now it has fallen in!  The cliff there overhangs it!”

“Yes, the Tailor’s Cliff!” shouted all the boys.  “It fell in the year 1755!”

“Fell!” said the old man, as if in astonishment that any one but himself could know it.  “Everything will fall once, and the tailor directly.”  The robbers had placed him upon the cliff and demanded that if he would be liberated from them, his ransom should be that he should sew a suit of clothes up there; and he tried it; but at the first stitch, as he drew the thread out, he became giddy and fell down into the gushing water, and thus the rock got the name of ’The Tailor’s Cliff.’  One day the robbers caught a young girl, and she betrayed them, for she kindled a fire in the cavern.  The smoke was seen, the caverns discovered, and the robbers imprisoned and executed.  That outside there is called ‘The Thieves’ Fall,’ and down there under the water is another cave, the elv rushes in there and returns boiling; one can see it well up here, one hears it too, but it can be heard better under the bergman’s loft.

And we went on and on, along the Fall, towards Top Island, continuously on smooth paths covered with saw-dust, to Polham’s Sluice.  A cleft had been made in the rock for the first intended sluice-work, which was not finished, but whereby art has created the most imposing of all Trollhaetta’s Falls; the hurrying water falling here perpendicularly into the black deep.  The side of the rock is here placed in connection with Top Island by means of a light iron bridge, which appears as if thrown over the abyss.  We venture on to the rocking bridge over the streaming, whirling water, and then stand on the little cliff island, between firs and pines, that shoot forth from the crevices.  Before us darts a sea of waves, which are broken by the rebound against the stone block where we stand, bathing us with the fine spray.  The torrent flows on each side, as if shot out from a gigantic cannon, fall after fall:  we look out over them all, and are filled with the harmonic sound, which since time began, has ever been the same.