The intelligence had the effect of bringing his mother to a seat, with the plate on her lap, while she looked apprehensively from her son to her husband.  There was nothing, however, in the aspect of the latter to justify her apprehension.

“Who did you hear this from, Gjert?” she asked.

“Who did I hear it from?  From everybody.”

But bethinking him then that in his incredulous home “everybody” would be reckoned about as valuable an authority as “nobody,” he continued—­

“From Frederick Beck.  He had talked himself with one of the sailors who was in charge of the officers’ gig down by the landing-stairs while his chief was on shore; and that wasn’t all he heard, but a lot of other queer things besides.”  Here he looked round him evidently with a satisfied feeling that he must have convinced them this time at any rate.

“He seems to have been a credible kind of a chap, that sailor,” observed his father with a mild irony, which escaped his son, however; while his mother looked at him in some anxiety lest he should be going to sit there and make a fool of himself.  “Well, and what further did he tell him?”

“Oh, lots of things.”

“Let us have them.”

“He said they had had such a hurricane down there, that they came across a whole town that had been blown away drifting out in the middle of the sea, with a minister praying in the midst of it;—­then, that they had run so close in to the land in beating up the Straits of Gibraltar, that they had taken a palm-tree on board on the end of the bowsprit with a whole family of negroes sitting in it, whom they had afterwards to put ashore.”

Gjert would have delivered himself of still another curious incident if he had not been brought up by the laughter of his parents.  The “bagman” too, was laughing, because he saw the others doing so, and received a crushing look accordingly from Gjert, who drew in his horns at once.

“Perhaps you don’t think it’s true?”

“Do you know what it is to spin a yarn, my boy?  That lad down in the gig has been spinning you a fine one,” said his father, as he sat down to the table.

Gjert continued to talk all through the meal, and when it was over, while his mother came in and out of the room, and his father sat over at the window, partly listening and partly looking out at the weather.  He described everything he had seen with such life and vividness, particularly all that concerned the officers and the cadets, that his mother sat down to listen, and his father, when there was a moment’s pause, observed with a quiet laugh—­

“I daresay you would have liked to have been one of the cadets yourself, Gjert?”

“Yes,” said his mother, beguiled for a moment by the dazzling thought.  “If he were only to go to school in Arendal no one knows what might happen.  The clerk says that nothing is any trouble to Gjert.”

Something in this observation must have struck discordantly upon her husband’s ear, for he changed colour and replied shortly after, somewhat sarcastically—­