Page:Tales from the Fjeld.djvu/91

Rh this, and when the priest came out of church he asked him what it all meant.

"It is a great wrong-doer," said the priest. "He has been executed for his ungodliness, and set up there to be mocked and spat upon."

"But what was his wrong-doing?" asked the lad.

"When he was alive here he was a vintner," said the priest, "and he mixed water with his wine."

The lad thought that no such dreadful sin.

"Well," he said, "after he had atoned for it with his life, you might as well have let him have Christian burial and peace after death."

But the priest said that could not be in any wise, for there must be folk to break him out of the ice, and money to buy a grave from the church; then the gravedigger must be paid for digging the grave, and the sexton for tolling the bell, and the clerk for singing the hymns, and the priest for sprinkling dust over him.

"Do you think now there would be any one who would be willing to pay all this for an executed sinner?"

"Yes," said the lad. "If he could only get him buried in Christian earth, he would be sure to pay for his funeral ale out of his scanty means."

Even after that the priest hemmed and hawed; but when the lad came with two witnesses, and asked him right out in their hearing if he could refuse to sprinkle dust over the corpse, he was forced to answer that he could not.

So they broke the vintner out of the block of ice, and laid him in Christian earth, and they tolled the