CHAPTER II.
After old Jacob had fallen into ill health, lighterman Kristiansen used to come out oftener to Torungen with provisions and other necessaries; and his visits now became periodical.
He was accompanied one autumn by his son Salve, a black-haired, dark-eyed, handsome lad, with a sharp, clever face, who had worked in the fishing-boats along the coast from his childhood almost, and had, in fact, been brought up amongst its sunken rocks and reefs and breakers.
He was something small in stature, perhaps; but what he wanted in robustness he made up in readiness and activity--qualities which stood him in good stead in the many quarrels into which his too ready tongue was wont to bring him.

He was eighteen years old at this time; had been already engaged as an able seaman; and was in great request at the Sandvigen and Vraangen dances,--a fact of which he was perfectly well aware.

Old Jacob's granddaughter, being a little girl of only fourteen years of age, was of course altogether beneath his notice, and he didn't condescend to speak to her.

He merely delivered himself of the witticism that she was like a heron; and with her thick, checked woollen handkerchief tied with the ends behind her waist, the resemblance was not so very far-fetched.

At any rate, he declared on the way home that such a specimen of womankind he, for his part, had never come across before, and that he would give anything to see her dancing in the public room with her thin arms and legs--it would be like a grasshopper.
The next time he came, she took out her grandfather's watch in its silver case and showed it to him, and some conversation passed between them.