So that was how the first boat was built at Sjöholm.
Thick as birds together stood a countless number of people on the headland in the autumn, watching Jack and his brothers putting out in the new Ottring.
It glided through the strong current so that the foam was like a foss all round it.
Now it was gone, and now it ducked up again like a sea-mew, and past skerries and capes it whizzed like a dart.
Out in the fishing grounds the folks rested upon their oars and gaped. Such a boat they had never seen before.
But if in the first year it was an Ottring, next year it was a broad heavy Femböring for winter fishing which made the folks open their eyes.
And every boat that Jack turned out was lighter to row and swifter to sail than the one before it.
But the largest and finest of all was the last that stood on the stocks on the shore.
This was the seventh.
Jack walked to and fro, and thought about it a good deal; but when he came down to see it in the morning, it seemed to him, oddly enough, to have grown in the night and, what is more, was such a wondrous beauty that he was struck dumb with astonishment. There it lay ready at last, and folks were never tired of talking about it.