“But what would you have me do, Thoralf?” asked the father, sadly. “To venture out on the ocean in this weather would be certain death.”
“True; but we can reach the Pope’s Nose on our skees, and there we might snare or shoot some auks and gulls. Though I am not partial to that kind of diet myself, it is always preferable to starvation.”
“Wait, my son, wait,” said Sigurd, earnestly. “We have food enough for to-day, and by to-morrow the storm will have ceased, and we may go fishing without endangering our lives.”
“As you wish, father,” the son replied, a trifle hurt at his father’s unresponsive manner; “but if you will take a look out of the chimney, you will find that it looks black enough to storm for another week.”
The father, instead of accepting this suggestion, went quietly to his book-case, took out a copy of Livy, in Latin, and sat down to read. Occasionally he looked up a word in the lexicon (which he had borrowed from the public library at Reykjavik), but read nevertheless with apparent fluency and pleasure. Though he was a fisherman, he was also a scholar, and during the long winter evenings he had taught himself Latin and even a smattering of Greek.[2] In Iceland the people have to spend their evenings at home; and especially since their millennial celebration in 1876, when American scholars[3] presented them with a large library, books are their unfailing resource. In the case of Sigurd Sigurdson, however, books had become a kind of dissipation, and he had to be weaned gradually of his predilection for Homer and Livy. His oldest son especially looked upon Latin and Greek as a vicious indulgence, which no man with a family could afford to foster. Many a day when Sigurd ought to have been out in his boat casting his nets, he stayed at home reading. And this, in Thoralf’s opinion, was the chief reason why they would always remain poor, and run the risk of starvation, whenever a stretch of bad weather prevented them from going to sea.
The next morning—the sixth since the beginning of the storm—Thoralf climbed up to his post of observation on the chimney top, and saw, to his dismay, that his prediction was correct. It had ceased snowing, but the wind was blowing as fiercely as ever, and the cold was intense.
“Will you follow me, father, or will you not?” he asked, when he had accomplished his descent into the room. “Our last fish is now eaten, and our last loaf of bread will soon follow suit.”
“I will go with you, my son,” answered Sigurd, putting down his Livy reluctantly. He had just been reading for the hundredth time about the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, and his blood was aglow with sympathy and enthusiasm.