[CHAPTER IV.]
BEHIND THE TIMES.
"I wish I had on a better rig," thought Ned, very naturally. "I look like anything."
He felt that he was going in among entire strangers, and that he was not by any means in company dress. He had come out fishing in a pair of blue flannel trousers and a blue woollen outing shirt, with canvas shoes, and wearing the low, brown felt hat he had dived in yesterday. It was dry now, but not handsome. He lowered his sail and began to paddle slowly along, thinking of all sorts of things, and watching sharply for whatever might turn up. He studied the sloop at anchor, as he went past it, and declared that it was a queer enough craft to look at. It was very long, and it was low amidships, with big thole-pins along the rails, as if it were planned to operate occasionally as a rowboat. The stern of it rose very high, so that it might contain a cabin, and so did the bow. Projecting from the latter was an iron-clad beak. It was chisel-edged, and Ned remarked:
"That's a ram, but she doesn't look much like a ship-of-war. Our ironclads have rams, but they never get near enough to other ships to strike with them. Our fighting has to be done with long-range guns. Well! I never saw her like before. Hullo! I see it! She is made like the Norse pirate pictures in that book! She is one of them!"
He was eager enough to go forward now, and he rowed with his eyes at work in all directions. The landing-place was now not far ahead of him. It was provided with a pretty substantial wharf, made of logs and stones. From this a pier of similar construction ran out about fifty feet into the harbour. Upon the deck of the pier, and on the wharf, and along the beach, were scattered men and women, and there were a number of stout-looking rowboats hitched here and there, or pulled up on the shore.
Ned ceased rowing for a full half-minute to stare intensely at the people, and then he exclaimed:
"I guess I'm right about it. These chaps are out and out Norsemen! That biggest man wears an iron topknot, too, and he carries a spear. Every man of 'em has a short sword at his belt, and those are all what the book calls seaxes. I know where I am now. I'm in for it! But how on earth am I ever to get home again in time for supper?"
That particular anxiety, and almost everything else, was speedily driven out of his head as he paddled his punt in among the fishing-boats at the pier. It came very near astonishing him, however, that not a soul among them seemed to be at all surprised at seeing him. They paid him no especial attention after they had hailed him, and after he had replied to them in the language which he had learned at home from old Erica. She herself had told him that her speech was not exactly the Norwegian of the printed books. She could not even read them very well, for she had been born up among the mountains and fiords, where the country people still talked the ancient Norse dialect, which could sometimes hardly be understood by town folk.
That is, he knew already that Norway, in that particular, was very much like parts of England, Scotland, Ireland, and several other countries.