“Gertrude pinched off a small piece for them, but on rolling it on her trough to get it into shape, it grew and grew, and filled up the trough completely. She looked at it in wonder. ‘No,’ said she, ‘that is more than you want;’ so she pinched off a smaller piece, and rolled it out as before; but the smaller piece filled up the trough, just as the other had done, and Gertrude put it aside, too, and pinched a smaller bit still. But the miracle was just the same; the smaller bit filled up the trough as full as the largest-sized kneading that she had ever put in it.
“Gertrude’s heart was hardened still more; she put that aside too, resolving, so soon as the strangers had left her, to divide all her dough into little bits, and to roll it out into great loaves. ‘I cannot give you any to-day,’ said she; ‘go on your journey, and the Lord prosper you, but you must not stop at my house.’
“Then the Lord Christ was angry; and her eyes were opened, and she saw whom she had forbidden to come into her house, and she fell down on her knees; but the Lord said, ‘I gave you plenty, but that hardened your heart, so plenty was not a blessing to you; I will try you now with the blessing of poverty; you shall from henceforth seek your food day by day, and always between the wood and the bark.[15] But forasmuch as I see your penitence to be sincere, this shall not be for ever: as soon as your back is entirely clothed in mourning this shall cease, for by that time you will have learned to use your gifts rightly.’
“Gertrude flew from the presence of the Lord, for she was already a bird, but her feathers were blackened already, from her mourning; and from that time forward she and her descendants have, all the year round, sought their food between the wood and the bark; but the feathers of their back and wings get more mottled with black as they grow older; and when the white is quite covered the Lord Christ takes them for his own again. No Norwegian will ever hurt a Gertrude-bird, for she is always under the Lord’s protection, though he is punishing her for the time.”
“Bravo, Torkel,” said the Parson. “I could not preach a better sermon than that myself, or give you sounder theology.”
“You seem always on the look-out for a superstition,” said the Captain.
“So I am,” said the Parson. “There is nothing that displays the character of a people so well as their national legends.”
“But do you not consider that in lending your countenance to them, and looking as if you believed them, you are lending your countenance to superstition itself?”
“Well,” said the Parson, “what would you have me do? laugh them out of it, like Miss Martineau? And if I succeeded in that, which I should not, what should I have done then? Why, opened a fallow for scepticism. Superstition is the natural evidence of the Unseen in the minds of the ignorant; to be superstitious, is to believe in a Being superior to ourselves; and this is in itself the first step to spiritual advancement. Inform the mind, teaching it to distinguish the true from the false, and superstition—that is to say, the reverence for the unseen—brightens into true religion. Take it away by force, or quench it by ridicule, and you have an unoccupied corner of the soul for every bad passion to take root in. Superstition is the religion of the ignorant.”
“Well, there is truth in that,” said the Captain. “When a boy becomes a man, he will not play prison-base, or go a bird’s-nesting; but prison-base and bird’s-nesting are no bad preparation for manly daring and gallant enterprise.”