“What does she do with them?” asked Berg.

“Oh, a witch always needs corpses.  She makes ointments out of them, or perhaps she eats them.  On moonlight nights she sits in the surf, where it is whitest, and the spray dashes over her.  They say that she sits and searches for shipwrecked children’s fingers and eyes.”

“That is awful,” said Berg.

The boy answered with infinite assurance:  “That would be awful in others, but not in witches.  They have to do so.”

Berg Rese found that he had here come upon a new way of regarding the world and things.

“Do thieves have to steal, as witches have to use witchcraft?” he asked sharply.

“Yes, of course,” answered the boy; “every one has to do what he is destined to do.”  But then he added, with a cautious smile:  “There are thieves also who have never stolen.”

“Say out what you mean,” said Berg.

The boy continued with his mysterious smile, proud at being an unsolvable riddle:  “It is like speaking of birds who do not fly, to talk of thieves who do not steal.”

Berg Rese pretended to be stupid in order to find out what he wanted.  “No one can be called a thief without having stolen,” he said.

“No; but,” said the boy, and pressed his lips together as if to keep in the words, “but if some one had a father who stole,” he hinted after a while.

“One inherits money and lands,” replied Berg Rese, “but no one bears the name of thief if he has not himself earned it.”

Tord laughed quietly.  “But if somebody has a mother who begs and prays him to take his father’s crime on him.  But if such a one cheats the hangman and escapes to the woods.  But if some one is made an outlaw for a fish-net which he has never seen.”

Berg Rese struck the stone table with his clenched fist.  He was angry.  This fair young man had thrown away his whole life.  He could never win love, nor riches, nor esteem after that.  The wretched striving for food and clothes was all which was left him.  And the fool had let him, Berg Rese, go on despising one who was innocent.  He rebuked him with stern words, but Tord was not even as afraid as a sick child is of its mother, when she chides it because it has caught cold by wading in the spring brooks.

***

On one of the broad, wooded mountains lay a dark tarn.  It was square, with as straight shores and as sharp corners as if it had been cut by the hand of man.  On three sides it was surrounded by steep cliffs, on which pines clung with roots as thick as a man’s arm.  Down by the pool, where the earth had been gradually washed away, their roots stood up out of the water, bare and crooked and wonderfully twisted about one another.  It was like an infinite number of serpents which had wanted all at the same time to crawl up out of the pool but had got entangled in one another and been held fast.  Or it was like a mass of blackened skeletons of drowned giants which