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never occur to God to take them to His heart. The boy read aloud from the
Book of Sermons,
and the people stared vacantly and scratched themselves and dozed and suspected nothing. They thought he knew no more about God than they themselves did.
    It was the practice there to load him with far more work than he was fit for. During the winter when he was ten years old, he had to carry all the water for the house and the barn. He was slightly built and delicate, pale, with large blue eyes and a reddish tinge to his hair. He very seldom had enough to eat, but he lacked the courage to steal from the larder like Kristjána, the farm girl, who could do as she pleased because she had a mother and had started making eyes at the brothers, besides. Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík was extremely honest, because he had no one on his side in anything. Often he was not served until the others had finished and gone out, just because he was alone in the world. And as anyone who has ever been a child knows, it is a great ordeal to have to wait until the others have finished and not be allowed to say anything, either; he was not allowed to say anything because he had no one. But sometimes it happened that Magnína, the daughter of the house, would give him her leftovers when everyone else had gone out, and sometimes there was a tasty morsel left in her bowl, although no one had noticed how it had got there. In general, the members of the family did most of their eating, in secret, between meals.
    Carrying water: after the first two buckets the boy would be very tired, but that was just the beginning. He carried and carried. He had to fill two large barrels and also carry two buckets for the rams. Before long he would begin to stagger, and his knees and arms would tremble with exhaustion. Often the weather was bad; snow and sleet and storm. The wind tore at the buckets; sometimes it was as if he were going to take off completely, buckets and all. But he did not take off. He put the buckets down while the gust roared past. He tried to tie his green hat tighter under his chin with frozen fingers that were numb from the bucket handles. He asked God to give him supernatural strength, but God was too busy to respond. Onwards, onwards! Twenty more trips to go. The water splashed from the buckets over his feet, all the way up to his knees; he was soaking wet, and there was a frost. He slipped on the icy path, and the water spilled out of both buckets; it spilled underneath him and over him. He began to cry, but he was only crying for himself; nobody paid any attention to what happened to him. He felt that the world was avenging itself on him for something he had never done, perhaps just for the fact that his mother had had an extra child, or that his father had run away from his mother. Then one of the brothers would appear between the barn and the house and shout, “Having a nap, then?” So he would stand up soaking wet in the frost and start to adjust his green hat which had been knocked askew when he fell. And thus each day he was taxed beyond his strength. Every morning he woke up with dread in his heart and nausea in his throat; the divinely merciful hand of sleep was withdrawn, and the day faced him with new water-carrying, new storms, new hunger, weariness, exhaustion, chivvying, cursing, blows, kicks, thrashings. His whole life in childhood was one endless ordeal, like those fairy tales in which men fight with giants and dragons and devils.
    Sometimes he was momentarily seized by a realization, like some deeper insight into existence, that he had a mother; he would stop suddenly, in midbreath perhaps, as this realization pierced him so sharply that he felt faint. He had an overwhelming urge to throw away whatever he was holding and take to his heels, away, away, over mountains and moors, fjords and valleys, through towns and parishes, until he found her. But his feet were fettered. He had to content himself with leaning against God’s bosom. And