They reach the wharf. The tug "Bully-boy," with black funnel and hissing steam, is lying taut to the pier. Her head is really spinning. How stupid those eight men are! they haven't backed the horses enough. Hats off! They lay him on the deck; they have put the old flag under him and piled the posies on top. She pats the dogs and bids them stay, and lets the women kiss her, and walks up the plank: one plank! surely there should be four,-- "For thee it is that I dree such pain As when wounded even a plank will; My bosom is pierced, is rent in twain, That thine may ever bide tranquil, May ever remain Henceforward untroubled and tranquil." No, that's not the verse: she can't get it. "I heard four planks fall down with a saddening echo?--with a hollow echo?" She stands by the side of the coffin and gazes quietly at the crowd,--looks at the men with their uplifted hats, at the black-draped horses (Puck is biting Olla in the neck), at the children, and the group of dogs; and all the staring eyes seem to melt into one monster multi-colored eye, that pierces her through and through. Can't they see she is hollow,--the fools? They loosen the hawser and cry "All right!" and "Bully-boy" swings round, and they steam sea-ward, and she sits and dreams, and the tug dances and splutters and fusses through the sunlit sea, past fjord mouths and hamlets, and boats with singing children and yapping dogs; and she never thinks of the future, nor of the steamer she is to meet at the city, nor makes any plan,--simply sits and lets her fancies run riot through her tired brain; sits under a canopy of clear air, and listens to the strange conceits that arise in her thinking self. She is a Viking's bond-maid of olden days; she hid on his bark while they built up his funeral pyre and laid the old warrior down. She watched them touch the flaming pine-knot to his fiery mausoleum, and set him adrift to the strain of a fierce, exultant chant of victory, to sail out on his last voyage for a handigrips with the grim foe Death. Ay, he too was a primitive man, with the primeval passions of untamed nature surging up and eating their way to his soul's core, as restless breakers hollow a place on the coast; and now he is going to rest.