town quite as unexpectedly as she had left it. She brought with her a little girl about eight years old, the image of her former self, only that everything about the child was more refined and seemed, so to speak, as if wrapt in a dream. Gunlaug had been married, it was said, money had been left her, and now she had come back to open a sailor’s inn.
This she managed so well that merchants and skippers got into the habit of coming to her to hire hands, sailors to seek employment. She never charged a penny commission, but despotically wielded the power this agency gave her. Although she was but a woman, and never left her house, she was most emphatically, “the influential man” of the town. She was called “fisher Gunlaug,” or “Gunlaug on the hill-side;” her title of “fisher maiden” was transferred to her daughter, who went ranging about the town at the head of an army of small boys.
It is the daughter’s story which is here to be told. She had something of her mother’s strength of character, and she found opportunity to use it.
