It is a long way, she keeps thinking. Where are they going, anyway? Oh, yes, to the tug,--the tug that is to bear them away on a glorious lonely death-ride, out of the sunny fjord to the glistening sea, away to where the rainbow ends. At the end of the rainbow you'll find a pot of gold! But, first, they must pass through the wide wooden gate; it is open. What is that they say about a wide wooden gate? No, it's about a road,--it's the wide road that leads to destruction. They have decked the gate with green too,--the gate through which the children used to peer with inquisitive, frightened child-eyes, up to the house where the wicked man dwelt. How they used to scamper away with half-real, half-acted terror at a cry of, "The man is coming!"--the man who was a bogie-man to them, a name with which to threaten them when naughty, about whom their elders told dreadful tales in subdued voices. She remembers this, and smiles half sadly to see as they reach the narrow street how the children swarm to meet his coming. There is no school to-day, and they get under the horses' hoofs, and crowd round the car, and point with dirty, chubby fore-fingers, and clasp hands, and cluster together in groups of twos and threes, and gaze with awe-struck eyes, and whisper, and follow. And one whispers to his comrades how he once got a drive and a silver piece from "the man," and another how he gave little Tulla a piece of cake. And she thinks of the train that danced in the wake of the pied piper, and of his own little ones who know him not. Perhaps they are dancing and laughing to-day,--to-day, when the father who gave them no name is being borne along to the tuneful patter of little feet that are not of his kith nor his kin. She seems to feel that that thing in the coffin is not he. He is walking next her, laughing with the rare humor of his best moments; chuckling at the grand funeral they are giving him,--him the bad man, of whom they had nought but evil to say. How hard it is to go down hill slowly! She tells herself that later on in the ages to come, when the little ones here have gone to their last homes as withered elders, the tales of the bogie-man of their child-days may have grown into a saga of a wild Angleman with great wealth, who landed and made himself a home on their coast, and drank and caroused and bought the strangest things; who took mad sails in a boat right into the teeth of coming gales that the pilots feared to brave, when the white-crested horses leaped high over the rocks, and the sea-dragons roared below, and the gray mews shrieked shrill warnings to the fishers to hasten them home; who turned the night into day, and took wild hag-rides with his baying and galloping horses at midnight, and used to crack his whip and urge them on with exultant oaths, and never let his little wife out of his sight, but call for her if he missed her till the woods rang with her name.