In reply to my query whether there were any old memorials about, the obese Boniface moved his lack-lustre eye slowly, and shook his head. Old memorials, forsooth! were not the newly-killed calf and its appetizing adjuncts subjects much more worthy of attention? Presently, however, after an interval of seemingly profound thought, he observed that there was something like a coffin or two in the forest a mile off.
“Had they been opened?”
“No. People thought it unlucky to touch them. They were near his hûsman’s, and the hûsman would show me them if I mentioned his name.”
At the hûsman’s I found nobody but his wife, who was ignorant on the subject. So, after a fatiguing search, I returned without having accomplished my purpose, and the horse having arrived, I had to start. The fat man was now recumbent on the bed within, looking uncommonly like a barrel of beer. All Norwegians take a siesta at noon. The charge made for my sumptuous repast was twelve skillings = five-pence English. As we roll along gaily through the sombre pine-forests, the odour of which the Norwegians, I think wrongly, compare to that of a “dead house” (Liighus). I fall, as a matter of course, into conversation with Knut, my schuss.
“Had he ever seen these trolls which people talked of so much higher up the valley.”
“No; I never saw one; but I’ve heard one.”
“Indeed, where?”
“When I was hewing wood in the forest.”
“What did he say?”
“He only said ‘Knut’ three times.”