"What rubbish you talk, Randulf!" said the chief pilot, who was seated at the card-table.
"Rubbish!" said Randulf, pugnaciously. "Your word is better than mine, is it? I tell you that when a man is doomed, his trousers hang loosely about him."
They all laughed, and some one suggested that when people are ill they grow thin.
"No, no," cried Randulf, with much warmth; "what I allude to has its own peculiar appearance. The trousers look so heavy, so empty, and so long, that they seem as if they would slip down, and three heavy folds rest upon the feet. When I see this, I know that a man has not long to live. You may take this as a fact."
When the bad weather began in October, Jacob Worse went out but seldom; he had grown chilly, and kept much to his room.
He read the small books as much as he could, but they did not avail to bring him that spiritual comfort for which he strove so hard.
At the meeting it was strange to see, amidst the peaceful, benignant faces, this woe-begone old man, with his thick white hair and his deeply furrowed placid cheeks, looking wistfully from one to the other, and listening anxiously, hoping some day to hear the words which should bring peace to his soul.
But from old times the devil had too secure a hold upon him, placing oaths upon his tongue and evil thoughts in his heart.
At the meeting, when Sivert Jespersen was reading out a sermon, the devil would lug in those two hundred barrels of salt, or so distorted his vision that Endre Egeland would seem to be staring at the girls with his small green eyes.
At night, when the wind howled around his house, it seemed to him that the devil would take him out on the sea on board the Hope; and he experienced a pleasure in lying and thinking how well he used to sail the good ship, and how grand she looked in a heavy sea.