One day he found her sitting on a boulder by the sea-shore.  She had in her lap an eider duck which had been shot, and could only have died quite recently, for it was still warm, and she wept bitterly over it.  It was, she sobbed, the same bird which made its nest every year beneath the shelter of their outhouse—­she knew it quite well, and she showed him a red-coloured feather in its white breast.  It had been struck dead by a single shot, and only a single red drop had come out of it; it had tried to reach its nest, but had died on its way on the strand.  She wept as if her heart would break, and dried her face with her hair in impetuous Finnish fashion.  Eilert laughed at her as boys will, but he overdid it, and was very pale the whole time.  He dared not tell her that that very day he had taken a random shot with his father’s gun from behind the headland at a bird a long way off which was swimming ashore.

One autumn Eilert’s father was downright desperate.  Day after day on the fishing grounds his lines caught next to nothing, while he was forced to look on and see the Finn pull up one rich catch after another.  He was sure, too, that he had noticed malicious gestures over in the Finn’s boat.  After that his whole house nourished a double bitterness against them; and when they talked it over in the evening, it was agreed, as a thing beyond all question, that Finnish sorcery had something to do with it.  Against this there was only one remedy, and that was to rub corpse-mould on the lines; but one must beware of doing so, lest one should thereby offend the dead, and expose oneself to their vengeance, while the sea-folk would gain power over one at the same time.

Eilert bothered his head a good deal over all this; it almost seemed to him as if he had had a share in the deed, because he was on such a good footing with the Finn folks.

On the following Sunday both he and the Finn folks were at Berg church, and he secretly abstracted a handful of mould from one of the Finn graves, and put it in his pocket.  The same evening, when they came home, he strewed the mould over his father’s lines unobserved.  And, oddly enough, the very next time his father cast his lines, as many fish were caught as in the good old times.  But after this Eilert’s anxiety became indescribable.  He was especially cautions while they were working of an evening round the fireside, and it was dark in the distant corners of the room.  He sat there with a piece of steel in his pocket.  To beg “forgiveness” of the dead is the only helpful means against the consequences of such deeds as his, otherwise one will be dragged off at night, by an invisible hand, to the churchyard, though one were lashed fast to the bed by a ship’s hawser.

When Eilert, on the following “Preaching Sunday,” went to church, he took very good care to go to the grave, and beg forgiveness of the dead.