Who has not heard of that solitary step which lies between the sublime and the ridiculous? The very question may seem ridiculous. And who has not, at one period or another of life, been led to make comparisons to that step? Why then should we hesitate to confess that the step in question has been suggested by the brevity of that other step which lies between the beautiful and the plain, the luxuriant and the barren, the fruitful and the sterile—which step we now call upon the reader to take, by accompanying us from Vinland’s shady groves to Greenland’s rocky shores.

 

Leif Ericsson is there, standing on the end of the wharf at Brattalid—bold, stalwart, and upright, as he was when, some years before, he opened up the way to Vinland. Flatface the Skraelinger is there too—stout, hairy, and as suggestive of a frying-pan as he was when, on murderous deeds intent, not very long before, he had led his hairy friends on tiptoe to the confines of Brattalid, and was made almost to leap out of his oily skin with terror.

 

But his terror by this time was gone. He and the Norsemen had been reconciled, very much to the advantage of both, and his tribe was, just then, encamped on the other side of the ridge.

 

Leif had learned a little of the Skraelinger tongue; Flatface had acquired a little less of the Norse language—and a pretty mess they made of it between them! As we are under the necessity of rendering both into English, we beg the reader’s forbearance and consideration.

 

“So you are going off on a sealing expedition, are you?” said Leif, turning from the contemplation of the horizon, and regarding the Skraelinger with a comical smile.

 

“Yis, yo, ha, hooroo!” said Flatface, waving his arms violently to add force to his reply.

 

“And when do you go?” asked Leif.

 

“W’en? E go skrumch en cracker smorrow.”

 

“Just so,” replied Leif, “only I can’t quite make that cracker out unless you mean to-morrow.”

 

“Yis, yo, ha!” exclaimed the hairy man. “Kite right, kite right, smorrow, yis, to-morrow.”

 

“You’re a wonderful man,” remarked Leif, with a smile. “You’ll speak Norse like a Norseman if you live long enough.”

 

“Eh!” exclaimed the Skraelinger, with a perplexed look.

 

“When are you to be back?” asked Leif.

 

Flatface immediately pointed to the moon, which, although it was broad daylight at the time, showed a remarkably white face in the blue sky, and, doubling his fist, hit himself four blows on the bridge of his nose, or rather on the spot where the bridge of that feature should have been, but where, as it happened, there was only a hollow in the frying-pan, with a little blob below it.

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