he was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost
its self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were
not afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had
prospects before him when his father went down off the North Cape
in the long Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent
horror of seafaring life, had followed her brother to America.
Eric was eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in
stature, with a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede's;
hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson's amorous Prince, and eyes
of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women.

He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain
confidence of approach, that usually accompanies physical
perfection. It was even said of him then that he was in love with
life, and inclined to levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide.
But the sad history of those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an
arid soil and under a scorching sun, had repeated itself in his
case. Toil and isolation had sobered him, and he grew more and
more like the clods among which he laboured. It was as though some
red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate
fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in
which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them
quite away. It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of
the eyes of those Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable
sadness, quite passive, quite hopeless, a shadow that is never
lifted. With some this change comes almost at once, in the first
bitterness of homesickness, with others it comes more slowly,
according to the time it takes each man's heart to die.

Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a