"And then we sold all sorts of things, and drew numbers, and had a lucky bag; and Hans Jacobsen played on the melodeon; and missionary Hansen told us about the poor blacks and all his blessed work, and how the Lord guided his footsteps through the sandy wastes, and how he baptized a chief and all his wives in the waters of faith. And Nils Pettersen says they took out more raw alcohol and spent gun-powder and spoilt cotton goods than the fear of God; and that the 'Bird o' Faith' cleared one hundred per cent on her freight. But Nils Pettersen was always a liar; and oh it was a blessed thing to do all that for the heathen blacks! And then the kapelan spoke again, a touching discourse!" And she refills her glass, dodging his stick and watching him out of the tail of her eye as she turns the heel of her stocking, and repeats the whole of the sermon. His vocabulary is exhausted, and he is inventing the weirdest oaths, hurling them forth, a deep accompaniment to her shriller sermon, with its sanctimonious sing-song tune and unctuous phrasing; for she is, perhaps unwittingly, mimicking the kapelan to the life. He is getting tired and drowsy, the cognac is rising to her head, and even a kapelan's sermon must draw to a close; and as a mother will change her lullaby into a quick hushoo, and pat mechanically with a drowsy nod as the child drops to sleep, so Marie puts her knitting tidily into her apron pocket, and folding her withered old hands breaks into a hymn. He opens his eyes languidly, and protests feebly with a last damn; but Marie has exorcised the devil this time. His jaw drops, and muttering softly, he falls into heavy sleep; and she sings on, till her head too droops on her breast, and her quavering old woman's voice dies away in an abortive allelujah! And the motes dance in the golden bar of a waning sun-ray that pierces the room and crosses the motionless figures; and above stairs the little mistress is wrapped in rare, delicious, dreamless slumber. And I like to think that the recording angel registered that sleep to the credit of Jomfru Marie Larsen! II. A SHADOW'S SLANT. It is a sunny afternoon in mid-summer. A phaeton drawn by a pair of sturdy gray Stavanger horses, whose dainty heads and the mark of Saint Olav's thumb on their throats tell their race, is dashing along at a break-neck pace. The whip curls over them, and the vehicle sways a little to one side. Two great hounds bound along on the right of it.