horizon.

The moods of the two were for once reversed. The old man looked very sly
over his work, whilst she was quiet and cowed. Once only she broke out
angrily--

"But why doesn't the king get rid of them? If I was captain of a
man-of-war, I'd--"

"Yes, Elizabeth, if you were captain of a man-of-war!--what then?"

The child's conceptions apparently reached no further than such matters
as these as yet. She had seen few human beings as she grew up, and in
recent years, after her grandmother's death, she and her grandfather had
been the only regular inhabitants of the island. Every now and then
there might perhaps come a boat on one errand or another, and a couple
of times she had paid a visit to her maternal aunt on land, at Arendal.
Her grandfather had taught her to read and write, and with what she
found in the Bible and psalm-book, and in 'Exploits of Danish and
Norwegian Naval Heroes,' a book in their possession, she had in a manner
lived pretty much upon the anecdotes which in leisure moments she could
extract from that grandfather, so chary of his speech, about his sailor
life in his youth.

They had besides, in the little inner room, a small print, without a
frame, of the action near the Heather Islands, in which he had taken
part. It represented the frigate Naiad, with the brigs Samso, Kiel, and
Lolland, in furious conflict with the English ship of the line Dictator,
which lay across the narrow harbour with the brig Calypso, and was
pounding the Naiad to pieces. The names of the ships were printed