HOW FRAGMENTS OF THE STAR TRAVELLED TO A FAR COUNTRY. Ulf still had a name to win; but what a glorious thing it was to stand there in the stern of that swift craft and feel it quiver with life beneath him in response to the rhythmic stroke of the oarsmen, as it surged through the heaving water. Brightly the sunlight leaped along the sea. Snow-white was the foam that flashed upward underneath the curving prow, and now and then jetted high enough to come hissing inboard on the wind when the fitful gusts shifted to the rightabout. The men laughed, and carelessly shook the drops from their broad backs when it splashed among them. What a hardy set of men they were, those Northmen of old! They had no compass; they must steer by the sun, or by the stars, guess at their rate of sailing and tell by that how many more days distant was their destination. If the weather was fine, well. But if the sky clouded over, and sun nor star was seen for a week or more, while the wind veered at its own will, the chances were more than even that they would bring up on some coast where they had never been, with water and food to get, and perhaps every headland bristling with hostile spears. All this they knew, yet out to sea they went as happily as a fisherman seeks his nets. Trading, starving, fighting, plundering,--it was all one to them. On the whole, they seemed to like fighting the best of all, since that is what their sagas told most about. But Ulf was not by birth a Northman. Yet a rover by nature was he, and chief of all things that he most desired was to explore strange lands, and especially what lay beyond where the sky dipped downward and seemed to meet the sea. Ships came from thence, now and then; ships had gone thence, as he knew, and some had never come back, but perhaps were sailing still from land to land, through the great unknown. For weeks his ship sailed onward, over a lonely ocean. Now and then the misty fountain sprung upward from the waves where a whale was "blowing," with gulls hovering in the air above his glistening black back. There were more gulls then than now, and more whales also, and often the men would finger their lances wistfully and look with inquiring eyes at their youthful captain. At another time they would not have looked in vain; indeed, in after days Ulf became somewhat famous even among the men of the fjords for the number of whales he brought in. But now his soul was elsewhere. Even the problem of getting back did not trouble him in the least.