Then he must tell us about the Scritofinns of the Bothnia gulf; wild Lapps and Finns, who have now retreated before the Teutonic race. In Paul Warnefrid's eyes they are little wild hopping creatures--whence they derive their name, he says--Scritofinns, the hopping, or scrambling Finns. Scrattels, Skretles, often figure in the Norse tales as hopping dwarfs, half magical {158}. The Norse discoverers of America recognized the Skraellings in the Esquimaux, and fled from them in panic terror; till that furious virago Freydisa, Thorvard's wife, and Eirek the Red's daughter, caught up a dead man's sword, and put to flight, single-handed, the legion of little imps. Others, wiser, or too wise, say that Paul is wrong; that Skrikfins is the right name, so called from their 'screeking', screaming, and jabbering, which doubtless the little fellows did, loudly enough. Be that as it may, they appear to Paul (or rather to his informants, Wendish merchants probably, who came down to Charlemagne's court at Aix, to sell their amber and their furs) as hopping about, he says, after the rein-deer, shooting them with a little clumsy bow, and arrows tipt with bone, and dressing themselves in their skins. Procopius knew these Scritfins too (but he has got (as usual) addled in his geography, and puts them in ultima Thule or Shetland), and tells us, over and above the reindeer-skin dresses, that the women never nursed their children, but went out hunting with their husbands, hanging the papoose up to a tree, as the Lapps do now, with a piece of deer's marrow in its mouth to keep it employed; and moreover, that they sacrificed their captives to a war- god (Mars he calls him) in cruel ugly ways. All which we may fully believe. Then Paul has to tell us how in the Scritfin country there is little or no night in midsummer, little or no day in winter; and how the shadows there are exceeding long, and shorten to nothing as they reach the equator,--where he puts not merely Egypt, but Jerusalem. And how on Christmas days a man's shadow is nine feet long in Italy, whereas at Totonis Villam (Thionville), as he himself has measured, it is nineteen feet and a half. Because, he says, shrewdly enough, the further you go from the sun, the nearer the sun seems to the horizon. Of all which if you answer--But this is not history: I shall reply--But it is better than history. It is the history of history. It helps you to see how the world got gradually known; how history got gradually to be written; how each man, in each age, added his little grain to the great heap of facts, and gave his rough explanation thereof; and how each man's outlook upon this wondrous world grew wider, clearer, juster, as the years rolled on.