When the Juno last sailed from Arendal she had changed two of her crew.  One of the new hands was a square-built, coarse-featured, uncouth-looking creature, from the fjord region north of Stavanger, who called himself Nils Buvaagen, but whose name had been changed by the others to Uvaagen (not-awake), on account of his evident predisposition to sleep.  He was incredibly naive and communicative, especially on the subject of his wife and children (of which latter he apparently had his nest full), and had soon become the butt of the ship.  Salve was the only one who ever took his part, and that only because he saw all the others against him; and having also been the means of saving his life when he had been washed overboard one dark night in the English Channel, he had inspired the simple fellow with a perfectly devoted attachment to him.

They were up on the mainyard together that evening, where they had been helping to carry out an order with the mainsail.  The rest had gone down again, but Salve, who felt a longing to be alone, had remained aloft, and was standing on the foot-rope, with his elbows resting on the yard.  Nils’s sympathetic eyes had perceived from his behaviour and whole appearance that day that there was something unusual the matter with him; and when he saw that Salve remained behind, he remained too, observing that it would be pleasant to cool for a while before going to their hammocks in the close air between decks.

The sky above them blazed like a cupola “inlaid with patines of bright gold;” obliquely from the horizon the Southern Cross was rising, and the evening star shone in the warm night, before the moon had yet risen, with a silver gleam that threw clear light and shadow upon the deck below; while the vessel seemed to plough through a sea of phosphorescence, leaving in her wake a long trail of bluish glittering light.

From the forecastle below came wafted up a sentimental sailor’s song, the burden of which was pretty well summed up in the two concluding lines:—­

     “But never more her name I’ll utter till I die,
     For rosy though her lips were, her heart it was a lie.”

It sounded melancholy at that hour, and Nils, to judge from the occasional sighs with which he had accompanied it, was moved.  When it came to an end, Salve turned suddenly to him.

“You are distressing yourself for another’s sweetheart now, Nils.  What would you have done if it had been your own?”

“My wife!” He had evidently not for the moment taken in the idea, and looked with all his heavy countenance at Salve.

“Yes.  Wouldn’t you have liked to see her sunk to the bottom of the sea?”

“My Karen to the bottom of the sea!  I’d go there myself first.”

“Yes; but if she had been unfaithful to you?” persisted Salve, seeming to take a fiendish delight in bringing home the idea to the poor fellow.

“But she is not,” was the rejoinder.