"What are you going to do?" asked the mother, who believed she had not heard aright.
"I shall make an Italian landscape for Miss Mary," answered the commissioner, "and now I will leave you, my ladies, and make the sketch."
Therewith he arose and making a polite bow walked down to the beach.
"He is an odd being," said the mother, when the commissioner was out of hearing.
"An unusual being at the least," answered the girl; "but I don't believe he is perfectly sane. He seems to have principles, and on the whole is a kind man. What have you to say about him?"
"Hand me my yarn, child," said the mother.
"No, but say something ... tell me whether you like him or not," continued the girl.
The mother only answered with a half sad and half resigned glance, which expressed indifference.
Meanwhile the commissioner had gone down to the harbor and taken his boat to row out among the skerries. The summer heat had lasted out here a month, so that the air was hot; but drifting ice still coming from the north, where an unusually severe winter on the coast had caused bottom freezing, was now drifting southward, cooling the water, so that the lower air strata had greater density than the upper ones. The consequent refraction disfigured the aspect of the skerries and had caused the most magnificent mirages during the past few days. This scenery had given rise to long continued disputes between the commissioner and the ladies in which the fishing population had been summoned as judges, being the most competent because they had seen these phenomena of nature from childhood. And when on a morning the light red gneiss skerries through refraction stretched upwards and by the varying density in the strata of air seemed stratified as the cliffs of Normandy, Miss Mary argued that it really was those limestone cliffs, which were reflected as far up as the Baltic Sea, through a law of nature still unsolved by science. At the same time the white swell of the breakers in the strand stones was magnified and multiplied through refraction so that it really looked as though a flotilla of Normandy fishing boats were beating the wind under the cliffs. The commissioner, who had tried in vain to give the only correct explanation, in order to take away the supernatural, the more so as the people saw in the phenomena predictions, of course, of coming misfortunes; belief In ill luck, which acted as a damper on their enterprise, now found himself obliged to appear first as a wizard to win the ear of the populace, with the intention, however, to subsequently remove the mystery by telling them how he made his magic.