Page:A Picture-book without Pictures and Other Stories (1848).djvu/66

 their fall. That was a beautiful Greenland summer-night.

At the distance of a hundred paces, there lay a sick man within an open tent of skins; there was life still in his veins, but for all that he must die, because he himself believed it, and the people all around him believed it too. His wife, therefore, had sewn his cloak of skin tightly around him, that she might not be obliged to touch the dead; and she asked him—“Wilt thou be buried upon the mountains in the eternal snow? I will decorate the place with thy boat and thy arrows. The spirits of the mist shall dance away over it! Or wouldst thou rather be sunk in the sea?” “In the sea!” whispered he, and nodded with a melancholy smile. “There thou wilt have a beautiful summer-tent,” said the wife; “there will gambol about thee thousands of seals; there will the walrus sleep at thy feet, and the hunting will be certain and merry!” The children, amid loud howlings, tore down the outstretched skin from the window, that the dying man might be borne out to the sea—the swelling sea, which gave him food during his lifetime, and now rest in death.