however, but that Elias could catch a glimpse, by the light of the
lantern, of a long iron hooked spike sticking out of his back. And now
he began to put one and two together. Still he was less anxious about
his life than about his boat; so he there and then sat him down in it
with the lantern, and kept watch. When his wife came in the morning, she
found him sleeping there, with the burnt-out lantern by his side.

One morning in January, while he was out fishing in his boat with two
other men, he heard, in the dark, a voice from a skerry at the very
entrance of the creek. It laughed scornfully, and said, "When it _comes
to a Femböring_,[4] Elias, look to thyself!"

But there was many a long year yet before it _did_ come to that; but one
autumn, when his son Bernt was sixteen, Elias knew he could manage it,
so he took his whole family with him in his boat to Ranen,[5] to
exchange his _Sexæring_ for a _Femböring_. The only person left at home
was a little Finn girl, whom they had taken into service some few years
before, and who had only lately been confirmed.

Now there was a boat, a little _Femböring_, for four men and a boy, that
Elias just then had his eye upon--a boat which the best boat-builder in
the place had finished and tarred over that very autumn. Elias had a
very good notion of what a boat should be, and it seemed to him that he
had never seen a _Femböring_ so well built _below_ the water-line.
_Above_ the water-line, indeed, it looked only middling, so that, to one
of less experience than himself, the boat would have seemed rather a
heavy goer than otherwise, and anything but a smart craft.

Now the boat-master knew all this just as well as Elias. He said he
thought it would be the swiftest sailer in Ranen, but that Elias should