Around the little island of Ausserland the fishing-smacks hover all through the season. They rarely go out of sight; or, indeed, stand far off shore, for life is easy in Ausserland, and the famous Ausserland herrings, which give the island its prosperity, are oftenest to be caught in the broad reaches of shallow water that surround the island. Beyond these reaches there are fish, too; but out there the waters are more turbulent. And why should a fisherman risk his life and his beautiful brown duck sails in treacherous seas, when he has his herring-pond at his own door-step, so to speak. And they have a saying in Ausserland that if you are drowned you may go to heaven; but certainly not to Ausserland. And who would want to leave Ausserland? Life is so easy there that it takes most of the inhabitants about ninety years to die--and even then you can hardly call it dying. Life’s pendulum only slows down day by day, and swings through an arc that imperceptibly diminishes as the years go on, until at last, without surprise, without shock, almost without regret, so gradual is the process, you perceive that it has stopped. And then the whole village, all in Sunday clothes, marches out to the little graveyard on the hill, and somebody’s great birchen beer-mug is hung on the living-room wall in memory of one who ate and drank and slept, and who is no more. There are rooms in those old houses in Ausserland where the wooden mugs hang in a double row, and the oldest of them was last touched by living lips in days when the dragon-ships of the Vikings ploughed that Northern sea. [Illustration] Ausserland is a principality, and a part of a mighty empire; but except that it has to pay its taxes, and in return is guaranteed immunity from foreign invasion, it might just as well be an independent kingdom; or, rather, an independent state, for it is governed by Burgesses, elected by the people to administer laws made hundreds of years ago, and still quite good and suitable. If a man steals his neighbor’s goods, he is put in the pillory. But what should a man steal his neighbor’s goods for when he has all the goods that he wants of his own? The last time the pillory was used was for a shipwrecked Spanish sailor who refused to go to church on the ground of a rooted prejudice against the Protestant religion. And it must have been a singularly comfortable pillory, for somehow or other he managed to carve his name on it during the hour in which he stood there--his name and the date of the event, and there they are to this day: “Miguel Diaz jul 6 1743.” My own opinion is that they did not even let the top-piece down on him.