suns itself there between fertile or wooded slopes and ridges, over which are scattered in every direction the red cottages of the sailor population, skippers’ houses, and villas; and in every available spot, in every creek or bay where there is barely room for a vessel, the white timbers of ships in course of construction come into view.  It is an idyllic dockyard, a very beautiful and very appropriate approach to Norway’s principal seaport town; and whoever steams up it on a still summer’s day must enjoy a surprise that will not easily be effaced from his recollection.

At the period of our story, indeed, the picture was far from being so complete or rich:  but even then were becoming manifest the germs of the bustle and life which now pervade the place.

On one of the most beautiful points of the Sound peeped into view a small one-storeyed house with two small-paned attic windows projecting from its steep tiled roof, and with a pine-wood climbing the hillside behind, which was the property of Captain Beck; and here, until, as he proposed to do in a couple of years’ time, he retired from the sea and invested his fortune in the shipbuilding yard which he had in view, his family generally took up their residence during the summer months.  Hither in the early part of this summer, too, they had repaired.

It was no life of idleness, though, which they lived out there:  Madam Beck always made work for everybody, and had her own spinning-wheel in the sitting-room.  Her step-son had his occupation on land, and as much as he could do, as member of the coast commission.  But he used generally to come over on Saturdays in his pretty sail-boat and remain over Sunday; and on that day, too, some one or other family of their acquaintance in the town would make them an object for a pleasure party, and would usually spend the afternoon with them.

Carl Beck was always in great force on these occasions.  His brown face and frank sailor bearing and good looks would have been sufficient in themselves to make him a favourite with the ladies.  But, in addition to these claims upon their interest, he had been known to most of the younger ones among them from his schoolboy days, when he used to come home on leave as a cadet, and he seemed to enjoy particular confidential relations with nearly every one of them, or, at all events, to be in possession of some secret or other which only they two knew.  They had all kinds of jokes and expressions from their younger days which were unintelligible to the rest; and what is vulgarly called “chaff” formed, perhaps, the staple of his conversation with them, varied now and then by a touch of sentiment, which was intended, by chance as it were, to open up to them for a moment the real deeper nature which they might not have suspected him of possessing.  They used to twit him about his inclination to stoutness, and he used to joke about it too, and say he had too good a time of it.