"See here, Miss Mary," lectured the commissioner, always deceiving himself with the hope of being able to educate her; "the untrained eye has a propensity to see everything simple; the untrained ear to hear everything simple. You see here around you only gray granite, and the painter and the poet see the same. Therefore they paint and depict everything so monotonously; therefore they find the skerries so monotonous. And yet, look at this geological map of the surroundings and then throw a glance out over the landscape. We are sitting on the red gneiss region. Look at this stone you call granite, how rich is the variety; it is the baking together of the black mica, the white quartz and the pinkish feldspar."
He had taken a sample from the pile which the foundation layers had blasted from the skerry and laid in a heap for the building's foundation.
"And look, here is another. It is called eurite! See what fine shades of color, from salmon red towards flint blue. And here is white marble of primeval limestone."
"Is there marble here?" asked the girl, her imagination stirred at the mention of this valuable stone.
"Yes, there exists marble here, although it looks gray on the surface without being gray. For, if you observe it closer you will find what an infinite variety of color there is in the lichens. What a scale of the finest colors from the ramaline lichen India-ink black to the crottle's ash-gray, the ground liverwort's leather-brown, the parmelia lichen seal-green, the tree lungwort's spotted copper-green and the wall moss egg-yellow. Look closer out over the skerries as they are now lit by the sun, you will see that the rocks have different colors, and that the people who are used to seeing them, even give them names after the scale of colors, which they are acquainted with without knowing it. Do you see that the Black Rock is darker than the others, because it consists of the dark: hornblende; that the Red Rock is red, because it is composed of red gneiss, and the white skerries of clean washed eurite? Is it not more to know why, than to know that a thing is so; and still less to see nothing but an even gray, as the painter, who paints all the skerries with a mixing of black and white? Hear now the roaring of the waves, as the poets summarily call this symphony of sound. Close your eyes for a moment and you will hear better while I analyze this harmony in simple notes. You at first hear a buzzing which resembles the noise heard in a machine shop or a big city. It is the masses of water dashing against each other; next you hear a hissing; it is the lighter, smaller water particles which are lashed to foam. And now a grating as of a knife against a grindstone; it is the wave tearing against the sand. And now a rattling like the dumping of a load of gravel; it is the sea heaving up small stones. Then a muffled thud as when you clap the hollow of your hand to the ear, it is the wave which presses the air before it into a cavern; and lastly this murmuring as from distant thunder, it is big bowlders, rolling on the stony bottom."
"Yes, but this is to spoil nature for us!" said the girl.
"It is to make nature intimate with us! It gives me composure to know it, and thereby frees me from the poet's half-hidden fear of the unknown, which is nothing else than memories from the time of savage fiction, when explanations were sought but could not be found quickly; and in the emergency the fable of the mermaids and the giants was caught at. But now we pass on to the fishing, which shall be retrieved, leaving the salmon for some other time, and try new methods for stromling fishing. In two months the great fishing begins, and if I have not calculated wrongly it is going to be a failure in the autumn."
"How can you foretell that from your sofa?" asked the girl more cuttingly than inquisitive.
"I foretell it by the facts that I have seen—from my sofa—how the drifting ice in the spring scraped the shoals clear of kelp and other algæ, in which the stromling go to spawn. I foretell it by the scientific fact that the small crustaceans—no matter what they are called—on which the stromling feed, have stayed away from the banks since the seaweed was scraped away. What shall we do then? We shall try to fish in the deep water I If the fish don't come to me then I must go to the fish. And therefore we shall try with nets drifting after a floating boat. It is simple!"
"It is grand!" said Miss Mary.