It was all sand and stones, only sand and stones. The people stood in silent terror of God’s miracle-worker who had come to them. Captain Lennart was himself for a moment seized with astonishment. Only Mons laughed. “Go home, fellow,” said Captain Lennart, “before the peasants understand that there has never been anything but sand in these sacks; otherwise I am afraid they will sink your boat.” “I am not afraid,” said the man. “Go,” said Captain Lennart, with such an imperious voice that he went. Then Captain Lennart let the people know that Sintram had fooled them, but they would not believe anything but that a miracle had happened. The story of it spread soon, and as the people’s love of the supernatural is great, it was generally believed that Captain Lennart could work wonders. He won great power among the peasants, and they called him God’s wayfarer. CHAPTER XIII THE CHURCHYARD It was a beautiful evening in August. The Löfven lay like a mirror, haze veiled the mountains, it was the cool of the evening. There came Beerencreutz, the colonel with the white moustaches, short, strong as a wrestler, and with a pack of cards in his coat pocket, to the shore of the lake, and sat down in a flat-bottomed boat. With him were Major Anders Fuchs, his old brother-at-arms, and little Ruster, the flute-player, who had been drummer in the Värmland _chasseurs_, and during many years had followed the colonel as his friend and servant. On the other shore of the lake lies the churchyard, the neglected churchyard, of the Svartsjö parish, sparsely set with crooked, rattling iron crosses, full of hillocks like an unploughed meadow, overgrown with sedges and striped grasses, which had been sowed there as a reminder that no man’s life is like another’s, but changes like the leaf of the grass. There are no gravel walks there, no shading trees except the big linden on the forgotten grave of some old priest. A stone wall, rough and high, encloses the miserable field. Miserable and desolate is the churchyard, ugly as the face of a miser, which has withered at the laments of those whose happiness he has stolen. And yet they who rest there are blessed, they who have been sunk into consecrated earth to the sound of psalms and prayers. Acquilon, the gambler, he who died last year at Ekeby, had had to be buried outside the wall. That man, who once had been so proud and courtly, the brave warrior, the bold hunter, the gambler who held fortune in his hand, he had ended by squandering his children’s inheritance, all that he had gained himself, all that his wife had saved. Wife and children he had forsaken many years before, to lead the life of a pensioner at Ekeby. One evening in the past summer he had played away the farm which gave them their means of subsistence. Rather than to pay his debt he had shot himself. But the suicide’s body was buried outside the moss-grown wall of the miserable churchyard.