So he took the belt away with him, and said nothing about it.  It was no good giving pain to no purpose, thought he.

But the longer the winter lasted the more he bothered himself with odd notions about what the parson had said.  And he knew not what he should do in case he came upon something else, such as another boot, or something that a squid, or a fish, or a crab, or a Greenland shark might have bitten off.  He began to be really afraid of rowing out in the sea there among the skerries.

And yet, for all that, it was as though he were constantly being drawn thither by the hope of finding, perhaps, so much of the remains as might show the parson where the soul had been, and so move him to give them a Christian burial.

He took to walking about all by himself in a brown study.

And then, too, he had such nasty dreams.

His door flew open in the middle of the night and let in a cold sea-blast, and it seemed to him as if his brother were limping about the room, and yelling that he must have his foot again, the Draugs were pulling and twisting him about so.

For hours and hours he stood over his work without laying a hand to it, and blankly staring at the fifth wall[1].

At last he felt as if he were really going out of his wits, because of the great responsibility he had taken upon himself by burying the foot in the churchyard.

He didn’t want to pitch it into the sea again, but it couldn’t lie in the churchyard either.

It was borne in upon him so clearly that his brother could not be among the blessed, and he kept going about and thinking of all that might be lying and drifting and floating about among the skerries.

So he took it upon himself to dredge there, and lay out by the sea-shore with ropes and dredging gear.  But all that he dredged up was sea-wrack, and weeds, and star-fish, and like rubbish.

One evening as he sat out there by the rocks trying his luck at fishing, and the line with the stone and all the hooks upon it shot down over the boat’s side, the last of the hooks caught in one of his eyes, and right to the bottom went the eye.

There was no use dredging for that, and he could see to row home very well without it.

In the night he lay with a bandage over his eye, wakeful for pain, and he thought and thought till things looked as black as they could be to him.  Was there ever any one in the world in such a hobble as he?

All at once such an odd thing happened.

He thought he was looking about him, deep down in the sea, and he saw the fishes flitting and snapping about among the sea-wrack and seaweeds round about the fishing line.  They bit at the bait, and wriggled and tried to slip off, first a cod, and then a ling, and then a dog-fish.  Last of all, a haddock came and stood still there, and chewed the water a little as if it were tasting before swallowing it.