in the skins repeated the shadows of the weather-beaten, mossy stone.  Each saw his companion in his silence and immovability change into a stone image.  But in among the rushes swam mighty fishes with rainbow-colored backs.  When the men threw out their hooks and saw the circles spreading among the reeds, it seemed as if the motion grew stronger and stronger, until they perceived that it was not caused only by their cast.  A sea-nymph, half human, half a shining fish, lay and slept on the surface of the water.  She lay on her back with her whole body under water.  The waves so nearly covered her that they had not noticed her before.  It was her breathing that caused the motion of the waves.  But there was nothing strange in her lying there, and when the next instant she was gone, they were not sure that she had not been only an illusion.

The green light entered through the eyes into the brain like a gentle intoxication.  The men sat and stared with dulled thoughts, seeing visions among the reeds, of which they did not dare to tell one another.  Their catch was poor.  The day was devoted to dreams and apparitions.

The stroke of oars was heard among the rushes, and they started up as from sleep.  The next moment a flat-bottomed boat appeared, heavy, hollowed out with no skill and with oars as small as sticks.  A young girl, who had been picking water-lilies, rowed it.  She had dark-brown hair, gathered in great braids, and big dark eyes; otherwise she was strangely pale.  But her paleness toned to pink and not to gray.  Her cheeks had no higher color than the rest of her face, the lips had hardly enough.  She wore a white linen shirt and a leather belt with a gold buckle.  Her skirt was blue with a red hem.  She rowed by the outlaws without seeing them.  They kept breathlessly still, but not for fear of being seen, but only to be able to really see her.  As soon as she had gone they were as if changed from stone images to living beings.  Smiling, they looked at one another.

“She was white like the water-lilies,” said one.  “Her eyes were as dark as the water there under the pine-roots.”

They were so excited that they wanted to laugh, really laugh as no one had ever laughed by that pool, till the cliffs thundered with echoes and the roots of the pines loosened with fright.

“Did you think she was pretty?” asked Berg Rese.

“Oh, I do not know, I saw her for such a short time.  Perhaps she was.”

“I do not believe you dared to look at her.  You thought that it was a mermaid.”

And they were again shaken by the same extravagant merriment.

***

Tord had once as a child seen a drowned man.  He had found the body on the shore on a summer day and had not been at all afraid, but at night he had dreamed terrible dreams.  He saw a sea, where every wave rolled a dead man to his feet.  He saw, too, that all the islands were covered with drowned men, who were dead and belonged to the sea, but who still could speak and move and threaten him with withered white hands.