And Christof answered, as the custom was: “Fare thee all well, my Brother in the Lord,” and kissed his head. “Fare thee all well,” the priest said again. “If we return no more, thou wilt be governor and priest, and father and mother to thy country—to the old and young, the simple and the maimed. And so, again, beloved Brother in the Lord, be faithful—and fare thee all well.” So they went forth to fish, and the sea rose mightily between them and the land, so that they came not back for many days. And, even then, their wrecked boats came in before them, wherefore, like a tender message in advance of death, Christof and Christine knew. Yet, all came back, each one, as if at the end they would not be denied their land. But on each face the purple hue of death had long since passed. And Christof and Christine, and Simple Olaf and blind Agra, and the little children, dug their graves on the mountain side. II WHEN THE SUMMER CAME AGAIN Now, when the little fickle summer came again,—and the next year it was splendid,—two young gentlemen sauntered up the sea road to Thor’s Emerald and inquired, in something very like their language, for food and a guide into the mountain and the glacier. They got food, such as it was,—goat’s milk and flad bröd,—from Christine’s hands, and Christof was their guide—there was none else. And there could be none better. For his childhood had been spent on the glacier and the mountain. He had begot a legend for each crag his fathers had neglected to provide with one. So he led the daring young gentlemen from the south up into the most sacred of his caves and eyries, and, in the doing, found a wondrous pleasure. They were his age and he loved them; they loved him. He was the Viking to them—archaic as if born a thousand years before. Upon the mountain he was the animal snuffing rare air. Upon the glacier he was untamed liberty—unassailable as the nature in which it grew. Precisely these were the young travellers to him. For they filled the camp at twilight, and, long after it, the fantastic embers, with the magnificent ghosts of the world from which they came—of which Christof heard now first—treasuring every word. One evening as he came into camp with the wood he had hardly gathered for their evening fire, the rocks were echoing for the first time in their hoary existence “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Norseman did not understand the song, but he caught the spirit of the singers. The fire was not made. He leaned, rapt, against a crag, with bared head, while they sang it for him in his own language. After that they sang it often together so that he learned it. And, now and then, it came back to them in his almost terrible Norsk words, where he shouted it to the listening mountains. It had taken an almost religious hold upon the guide’s fancy.