“None of the spirits of the middle earth like bells,” said Torkel, “neither Alfs, nor Nisses, nor Nechs, nor Trolls, they do not like to think of man’s salvation. Bells call people to church, and that is where neither Troll nor Alf may go. They are sometimes very spiteful about it, too.”
“In the good old times, when it was Norway and Denmark, and we were not tied to those hogs of Swedes as we are now” (sinking his voice, out of respect to Birger, but by no means so much so that Birger could not hear him), “they were building a church at Knud. They pitched upon a highish mound near the river, on which to build it, because they wanted the people to see their new church, little thinking that the mound was the house of a Troll, and that on St. John’s eve, it would stand open supported on real pillars. Well, the Troll, who must have been very young and green, could not make out what they were going to do with his hill, and he had no objection whatever to a house being built upon it, because he reckoned upon a good supply of gröd and milk from the dairy. He could have seen but very little of the world above the turf not to know a church from a house. However, he had no suspicions, and the bells were put up, and the Pröbst came to consecrate. The poor Troll could not bear to see it, so he rushed out into the wide world, and left his goods and his gold and his silver behind him.
“The next day a peasant going home from the consecration saw him weeping and wringing his hands beyond the hearing of the bells, which was as near as he could venture to come. And the Troll told him that he was obliged to leave his country, and could never come back, and asked him to take a letter to his friends.
“I suppose the man’s senses were rather muzzy yet—he could hardly have had time to get sober so soon after the ceremony; but somehow or another he did not see that the speaker was a Troll, but took him for some poor fellow who had had a misfortune, and had killed some one, and fancied he was afraid of the Landamptman, particularly as he had told him not to give the letter to any one (indeed it had no direction), but to leave it in the churchyard of the new church, where the owner would find it.
“One would naturally wish to befriend a poor fellow in such a strait; so the man took the letter, put it into his pocket, and turned back.
“He had not gone far before he felt hungry, so he took out a bit of flad bröd and some dried cod that he had put into his pocket. They were all wet. He did not know how that could be; but he took out the letter for fear it should be spoiled, and then found that there was wet oozing out from under the seal. He wiped it; but the more he wiped it, the wetter it was. At last, in rubbing, he broke the seal, and he was glad enough to run for it then, for the water came roaring out of the letter like the Wigelands Foss, and all he could do he could only just keep before it till it had filled up the valley. And there it is to this day. I have seen it myself—a large lake as big as our Forres Vand. The fact was, the Troll had packed up a lake in the letter, and would have drowned church, bells, and all, if he had only sealed it up a little more carefully.”
“Well,” said the Parson, “this beats our penny-post; we send queer things by that ourselves, but I do not think anybody has ever yet thought of sending a lake through the General Post Office.”
“Is there not some story about Hercules cleaning out the Admiralty, or some such place, in a very similar way?” said the Captain.
“No,” said the Parson, “I never heard that the Admiralty has ever been cleaned out at all since the days of Pepys. If ever it is done, though, it must be in some such wholesale way as this—I do not know anything else that will do it.”
“The hill-men are not such bad fellows, though,” said Tom, on whom all this by-play about the Admiralty was quite lost, British seaman as he was; “and, by the way, Torkel, I wish you would not call them by their names, you know they do not like it, and may very well do us a mischief before we get clear of this fjeld. Many people say that there is no certainty of their being damned after all—our schoolmaster thinks they certainly will not, for he says he cannot find anything about damning Trolls in the Bible, and I am sure I hope it will not be found necessary to damn them, for they often do us a good turn. There was a Huusbonde in the Tellemark who had one of their hills on his farm that no one had ever made any use of, and he made up his mind to speak to the Troll about it. So he waited till St. John’s eve came round and the hill was open, and then he went, and sure enough he found the Bjergman. He seemed a good-humoured fellow enough, but he was not so rich as most of them; he had only a very few copper vessels in his hill and hardly any silver.