guard. When his wife came to look for him in the morning she found him
sleeping, with the extinguished lantern by his side.

One morning in the following January when he put out to fish with two
men in his boat besides himself, he heard in the dark a voice that came
from a rock at the entrance to the creek. It laughed scornfully, and
said: "When you get a ten-oared boat, take care, Elias!"

However, it was many years before anything happened to the ten-oared
boat, and by that time his eldest son, Bernt, was seventeen. That autumn
Elias went into Ranen with his whole family in the six-oared boat, to
exchange it for a ten-oared boat. Only a newly confirmed Fin girl, whom
they had taken in some years before, was left at home.

Elias had in his eye a half-decked ten-oared boat, which the best
boat-builder in Ranen had finished and tarred that very autumn. Elias
knew very well what a boat should be, and thought he had never seen one
so well built under the water-line. Above, on the contrary, it was only
fairly good, so that to any one less experienced it looked heavy, and
with no beauty to speak of.

The builder knew this just as well as Elias. He said he believed it
would be the first boat in Ranen for sailing; but that, all the same,
Elias should have it cheap, if he would only promise one thing, and that
was, not to make any alteration in it, not so much as to put a line on
the tar. Only when Elias had expressly promised this did he get the
boat.

But "the fellow," who had taught the builder the shape for his boats
below water-line--above it, he was obliged to work as he could by