sorrowful end. She seized him with both hands, lifted him from the ground and thrashed him to her heart's content; then she rowed back to town and forthwith started on foot across the mountains.
Pedro had sailed out that morning a lovesick youth, on his way to conquer manhood; he rowed home again an aged person who had never known manhood. His life owned but one remembrance, and that his own folly had lost; he had but one place of resort in the world, and thither he no longer dared go. While brooding over his own wretchedness and how all this had come to pass, his enterprising mood sank, as it were, into a slough, never more to rise. The small boys of the town, remarking his strange ways, soon began tormenting him, and as he had always been a mysterious character to the townsfolk, no one knowing anything about his ways or means, it did not occur to any one to interfere in his behalf. Soon he scarcely dared stir out of his house, at all events, not in the streets. His whole existence became one struggle with the boys, who doubtless did him the same service as gnats of a hot summer day: without them he would have sunk into an unbroken stupor.
Nine years later Gunlaug returned to the
