drawn up.

Now my father went to the cabin and told my mother that things were at
their worst, and she was very brave.

"If you are to die at this time, husband," she said, "it is good that I
shall die with you. Better it is, as I think, than a sickness that comes
to one and leaves the other. But after that you will go to the place of
Odin, to Valhalla; but I whither?"

Then spoke little Withelm, ever thoughtful, and now not at all afraid.

"If Freya wants not a sailor's wife who is willing to fight the waves
with Grim, my father, it will be strange."

My mother was wont to say that this saying of the child's did much to
cheer her at that time, but there is little place for a woman in the old
faiths. So she smiled at him, and that made him bold to speak of what he
had surely been thinking since the storm began.

"I suppose that Aegir is wroth because we made no sacrifice to him
before we set sail. I think that I would cast the altar stones to him,
that he may know that we meant to do so."

This sounds a child's thought only, and so it was; but it set my father
thinking, and in the end helped us out of trouble.

"I have heard," my father said, "that men in our case have thrown
overboard the high-seat pillars, and have followed them to shore safely.
We have none, but the stones are more sacred yet. Overboard they shall