One beautiful evening in the beginning of May Clement had been granted a
few hours' leave of absence. He was on his way down the steep hill
leading out of Skansen, when he met an island fisherman coming along
with his game bag. The fisherman was an active young man who came to
Skansen with seafowl that he had managed to capture alive. Clement had
met him before, many times.
The fisherman stopped Clement to ask if the superintendent at Skansen
was at home. When Clement had replied, he, in turn, asked what choice
thing the fisherman had in his bag. "You can see what I have," the
fisherman answered, "if in return you will give me an idea as to what I
should ask for it."
He held open the bag and Clement peeped into it once--and again--then
quickly drew back a step or two. "Good gracious, Ashbjoern!" he
exclaimed. "How did you catch that one?"
He remembered that when he was a child his mother used to talk of the
tiny folk who lived under the cabin floor. He was not permitted to cry
or to be naughty, lest he provoke these small people. After he was grown
he believed his mother had made up these stories about the elves to make
him behave himself. But it had been no invention of his mother's, it
seemed; for there, in Ashbjoern's bag, lay one of the tiny folk.
There was a little of the terror natural to childhood left in Clement,
and he felt a shudder run down his spinal column as he peeped into the
bag.
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