Longren had been sailing as a seaman on the tight three-hundred-ton brig, "The Orion", for ten years. He'd become more attached to her than many a son to his mother. Then he had been forced to give up the sea.
Here is how it happened. He had returned from a cruise-such visits home were infrequent. When he had walked to within sight of his small house in the fishing village of Caperna, he expected as always, when still a good distance away, to see his wife Mary on the threshold, waving to him, and as he came closer, running breathlessly to meet him. But this time she wasn't there. Instead, when he reached his cottage, he found an excited woman, their neighbor, standing beside a child's crib which had not been there before.
"Look at your daughter, my friend!" said the woman. "I've been taking care of her the past three months."
Longren grew pale. He bent down to look at the tiny creature not yet eight months old, who was staring fixedly at his long beard. Then he sat down, cast his eyes to the floor, and began fingering his mustache, still wet from the rain. "When did Mary die?" he asked.
The woman told her story, interrupting herself to murmur tenderly to the baby and to assert again and again that Mary was in paradise. Longren, once he had learned the details, could only feel that such a paradise was as dank and dark as the inside of a woodshed, that for the woman who had departed into that unknown country, true paradise would have been merely to sit beneath the light of a lamp with her baby daughter and her husband, returned from the sea.
Three months before Longren came home, the young mother had run out of money. She had been forced to spend more than half the amount he had left her on doctor's bills for herself and for the newborn baby after her difficult delivery. Unfortunately she had also lost the remainder, which, though not a large sum, was all she had to live on. She had tried to borrow money from the local innkeeper and shopkeeper, Manners, who was known to be well-to-do.
Mary had been to see him at six in the evening. The neighbor had met her at seven on the road to the nearby town of Lisse. Tearful and desperate, Mary had told her that she was going to town to pawn her wedding ring. Manners had agreed to a loan, but only in return for her love.
"We've not a crumb to eat in the house. I must pawn my ring so that the baby and I can somehow get along till my husband comes home."
It was cold and windy out. The neighbor had tried in vain to persuade the young woman not to walk to Lisse after dark.
"You'll be soaked through to the skin, Mary! It's drizzling already, and with this wind, there's bound to be a downpour soon."
From the seaside village to the town and back was a good three hours walk, but Mary refused to listen to the woman's advice.
"I've been enough trouble as it is," she said. "There is hardly a family to which I don't owe bread or tea or flour. I must go. That's all there is to it. She walked to town, returned, and the next day came down with a fever. Exposure to the bad weather and the night rain had resulted in pneumonia in both lungs, according to the doctor called to her bedside by their good neighbor. A week later Mary's bed was empty, and the woman had moved in to take care of the baby girl. She was a widow and alone, and it had posed no great problem for her. "Anyway," she added, "I'd be bored stiff with-out the little one."
Longer went off to town, collected his pay, said farewell to his comrades, and returned home to bring up his little Asole, as he had named her. As long as the baby could not walk by herself, the widow continued to live at the sailor's home acting as foster mother. But as soon as Asole learned not to fall when she stepped across the threshold, Longren announced that he himself would look after her. He thanked the woman for her help and sympathy and took up the lonely life of a widower, centering all his plans, hopes, love, and memories on his child.

Ten years of wanderings hadn't left him any the richer. He set to work. Soon his little toys began to appear in the stores in town. They were beautifully made models of rowboats and sail-boats, speedboats, one-masted and two-masted schooners, cruisers, and steamers. In short, he made what he knew about at first hand. And what he made replaced for him, at least in part, the bustle of seaports and the picturesque life of the sea, and he earned enough to live a modest, frugal life. He had always been taciturn. After his wife's death he became even more unsocial and reserved. True, on holidays he sometimes could be seen at the local tavern. But he never sat down. Standing at the bar, he quickly gulped down his drink and took his departure, muttering brusquely to the right and left, "Yes," "No," "Hello," "Good-bye," or "Just a little," in reply to the greetings and queries of his neighbors. He couldn't stand entertaining guests. When people came to see him, he cut their visits short with such broad hints that they themselves soon thought up some excuse to leave. He never called on anyone. It was not surprising that an air of estrangement soon separated him from his fellow-villagers. If in his work Longren had been more dependent on local people, he would quickly have been made to feel the consequences of such bad relations. But he had almost nothing to do with the village. He bought all his food and goods in town. Manners had never sold him so much as a box of matches. Longren even did his own housework and patiently taught himself the complexities of the unmasculine art of raising a daughter.

Asole was five. Her father had begun to smile ever more softly when he looked at her nervous, yet gentle, little face as she sat on his knees and worked at unbuttoning his vest, or sang wild and rollicking sailors' chanties. The songs, delivered in her childish voice which sometimes missed the letter "R," had about the same effect as a dancing bear wearing a light-blue ribbon.
It was at this time that an incident took place, the shadow of which fell on Longren and also darkened the childhood of Asole.
It was early spring and just as cruel and severe as winter though in a different way. For three weeks a sharp offshore north wind had been pressing against the cold earth.
The long row of keels of the fishing boats, which were pulled, bottoms up, onto the beach, looked, silhouetted against the sand, like the fins of an enormous fish. No one was foolhardy enough to go out fishing in such weather. One hardly saw a single person on the one and only street of the hamlet. The icy blast driving out from the hillocks of the shore to the empty horizon made the open air a torture. All the chimneys of Caperna worked from morning to evening, tumbling their smoke down the steep rooftops.
But these days of the north wind drew Longren from his warm cottage more often than did the sun and the sheets of airy gold it cast over the sea and Caperna whenever it came out in clear weather. Longren would go out on a wharf built along rows of pilings. He would stand for hours at the end of the plank pier, smoking his pipe, fanned by the wind, watching the sea floor, laid bare at the shoreline, grow smoky with gray foam on the heels of the waves. The water's thundering course to the black and stormy horizon filled the whole expanse with herds of fantastic, maned creatures driving in wild, uncontrolled despair to some distant consolation. The groans and moans, the roaring cannonades of enormous torrents, and the almost visible rush of wind which bathed the entire scene in its current had a deadening, deafening effect which helped dull Longren's grief. His tortured face relaxed as if in the troubled sadness of a deep sleep.

On one such day, twelve-year-old Hin, Manners' son, discovered his father's boat being beaten against the pilings beneath the pier and ran to tell him. The storm had only just begun. Manners had forgotten to pull the boat up on the beach. He went down to the water. Longren was standing at the end of the pier smoking, his back to him. No one else was out. Manners hurried to the middle of the pier, let himself down toward the churning water, got into the boat, and untied the moorings. He remained standing, and since he had no oars, began to pull the boat to shore by grasping one piling after the other. He stumbled momentarily and missed a pile. At that instant a strong gust of wind caught the prow of the boat, tearing it away from the pier toward the open sea. Stretching out as far as he could. Manners now could no longer reach the nearest piling. The wind and the waves rocked and drove the boat out into the water's fatal expanse. Realizing the danger, Manners was about to jump into the water to swim to shore, but he was too late. The boat was already turning and twisting beyond the end of the pier where the might and fury of the waves promised certain death. The distance between Longren and Manners, who was being carried out into the stormy deep, was no more than seventy feet. Not an impossible distance, since right under Longren's hand on the pier hung a coil of rope with a weight at its end—rope usually thrown from the pier to help boats dock in stormy weather.
"Longren!" screamed the terrified Manners. "Why are you standing there like a lump? I'm being carried away! Throw me the rope!"
Longren was silent. He watched Manners in the boat bobbing up and down. His pipe burned brightly, and taking his time, he removed it from his mouth to get a better view of what was happening.
"Longren!" Manners cried. "You hear me! I'm perishing! Save me!"
Longren said nothing. It was as if he had not heard the desperate call at all. He did not even shift from one foot to another until the boat had been
carried out so far that Manners could hardly be heard. Manners screamed in terror. He begged the sailor to run for help. He promised him money. He threatened and cursed, but Longren only edged a bit closer to the tip of the pier to keep the struggling boat in sight as long as possible.
"Longren!" he heard dimly, as if listening indoors to the muffled shouting of someone on the roof. "Save me!" At that moment, drawing in his breath deeply so that not a word would be lost in the wind, Longren shouted: "That's what she asked you to do! Think about that while you're still alive, Manners, and don't forget it."
The cries faded away and Longren went home. Asole, when she awoke, saw her father in deep thought, sitting before the guttering lamp. At the sound of his daughter's voice he went over to her, kissed her fervently, and pulled her blanket up over her shoulders.
"Sleep, darling," he said. "The morning's still far away."
"What are you doing?"
"I've spoiled a toy. Asole. Go back to sleep."

From then on no one nodded to him, reached out to shake his hand, or even cast a glance of recognition or greeting in his direction. Once and for all he was excluded from the affairs of the village. Little boys when they saw him would cry. "Longren drowned Manners!" He paid no attention. It was as if he didn't even notice that in the tavern or on shore, among their boats, the fishermen kept silence in his presence, avoiding him as if he had the plague. The Manners affair completed his estrangement from the village. Once total, it created a mutual hatred whose shadow fell on little Asole.

The small girl grew up without friends among the village children. There were only two or three dozen children near her age in Caperna. Like sponges, they soaked up the prejudices of their parents. Little Asole was soon placed beyond the pale of their interest. It did not happen all at once, but came about gradually, as a result of repeated scoldings and prohibitions. Finally there developed an awesome taboo, which gossip and malice magnified in the minds of the children into a dreadful fear of the sailor's cottage.

Longren's now totally secluded way of life helped to feed the tongues of gossip. It was rumored that the sailor had murdered someone somewhere, and that was why he no longer went to sea. Longren, they said, was gloomy and antisocial because he was "torn by the pangs of a guilty conscience." When Asole came near the village children at play, they chased her away, or threw mud at her, and taunted her by calling her father a "cannibal" and a "counterfeiter." Her efforts to make friends with the other children all ended in bitter tears, in black and blue marks, scratches, and other manifestations of "public opinion." In the end she ceased to take offense, but now and then she would ask her father: "Why don't they love us?"

"Oh, Asole," her father would say, "do you think that people like that can really love? One has to be able to love, and that's beyond them." "What do you mean—be able to love?" "Like this!" And he would take the little girl into his arms and tenderly kiss her sad eyes, which squinted in satisfaction.

Asole's favorite amusement were the stories her father told her. Evenings or on holidays when her father had put away his glue cans, his tools, and his incompleted toys, had taken off his apron and seated himself, relaxing with pipe in mouth, she would climb up on his lap. And there, encircled by his arms, she would point to the different parts of the toys he was making and ask what they were for. In this way there began Longren's fantastic talks to his daughter on life and people—talks in which Longren's former way of life, accident, luck, and fortune, surprising and unusual events, played a principal role. Longren, as he taught Asole the names of ropes and rigging, of sails and ship's tackle, would become inspired by his subject. The uses of windlass, wheel, or mast, the type of ship they were discussing, would remind him of some incident or anecdote. From them he would branch out into seafaring adventures in which superstition was interwoven with reality and reality with his own fantasy. In these stories he told her of the "tiger cat" who was the herald of a shipwreck; the flying fish who talked and whom one heeded or else went off course; of the Flying Dutchman and his violent crew; and of omens and ghosts, mermaids and pirates; all the fables and fairy stories with which sailors whiled away the time when their ships were becalmed or as they sat in their favorite taverns. Longren told also of shipwrecks and their victims, of people who had grown wild and forgotten how to speak, of hidden treasures, of the mutinies of galley slaves, and much more. The little girl listened to all of this perhaps even more attentively than those people who first heard about Christopher Columbus' discovery of a new continent. "Tell me more, please," Asole would beg when Longren fell silent. She would fall asleep right there on his breast, full of wonderful dreams.

For a more practical reason, it also made her very happy when the storekeeper came from town, eager for Longren's toys. So as to flatter her father and get his price down, he always brought some apples, a bit of pastry, and a fistful of walnuts for the little girl. Longren hated to bargain and usually asked only the going price for his work, but the buyer tried to get the toys even cheaper.

"Look here," Longren would say, "I've worked a whole week over this ship's launch. "The model was nearly ten inches long. "Just look at its strength, its draft, its quality. It's a boat that will carry fifteen men in any kind of weather." And then it all ended with the quiet humming of the little girl over her apple. The sound undermined Longren's determination, and he accepted the buyer's price. The shopkeeper, after filling his basket with beautiful, high-quality toys which he had bought at a bargain price, departed, laughing up his sleeve.

Longren did all his own housework. He split the wood, carried the water, fired the stove. He did the cooking and the laundry and the ironing. Besides all this he managed to earn money. When Asole was eight years old, her father taught her to read and write and now and then began to take her to town. Finally he sent her by herself, when there was need to collect money for toys that had been sold or to deliver new ones. This did not happen often, though Lisse was only a few miles from Capema. The road led through the woods and there was much there that could frighten a child. True, it was not so much physical danger that was to be feared so close to a town, but even that was possible. Therefore it was only on lovely mornings when the roadside was bathed in a sea of sunlight, calm, and flowers, at a time when Asole was least likely to be threatened by the phantoms of her lively imagination, that Longren let her make the trip alone.

Once, about halfway to town, the little girl sat down beside the roadway to eat a piece of meat pie placed in her basket for lunch. While she ate, she examined the toys. Two or three were new to her. Longren had made them at night while she was asleep. One of the new pieces was a miniature racing sloop. The white craft bore scarlet sails made from pieces of silk which Longren ordinarily used only for finishing the insides of cabins in steamers in the toys for rich customers. But, having made the sloop, he had found no suitable material for the sails and had simply used what he had, pieces of the scarlet silk. The sloop delighted Asole. The blazing, jolly color burned in her hands as brightly as a flame. The road at this point was intersected by a stream crossed by a narrow log bridge. "What if I put it in the water to sail a bit?" thought Asole to herself. "After all it won't get wet through and I can wipe it off."
Following the woods downstream a way, beyond the bridge, the little girl placed the sloop which so enthralled her into the water. The gleaming scarlet of the sails was immediately reflected in the transparent water. The sunlight shining through the fabric cast a trembling rosy light on the white stones of the river bed.
"Where do you hail from. Captain?" Asole asked in a commanding voice, and then replied for him:
"I've come . . . I've come from China."
"And what have you brought?"
"That I won't tell you." "So that's the kind of captain you are! I'll put you right back in the basket."
The captain was about to reply submissively that he had only been joking and was prepared to speak when a light but sudden offshore breeze turned the prow of the sloop toward the center of the stream. And like a real sloop taking off from shore, it floated at full speed down the current. Suddenly the scale of everything in front of the little girl changed. The little stream now seemed like a mighty river and the model sloop a big, distant ship. And toward it, fright- ened, almost tumbling into the water, she reached out both arms and hastened along the stream. "The captain got frightened," she thought to herself, hurrying after the toy which was floating away, in the hope that it would come to shore somewhere. Dragging the basket, which kept getting in the way. Asole exclaimed, "Oh, my heavens, what have I done!" And she kept trying not to lose sight of the lovely triangle of sail smoothly moving off into the distance. She stumbled, fell, got up, and ran on.
Asole had never been so deep into the forest. Absorbed in her eagerness to catch the toy, she had not looked about as she ran. There were many obstacles along the way: mossy trunks of fallen trees, holes, tall ferns, bushes such as sweetbrier and jasmine. These barred her way at every step. She gradually tired and stopped more and more often to catch her breath or to wipe sticky spider webs from her face. At times thickets of rushes and reeds completely hid the scarlet gleam of the sails, and Asole only caught sight of them again when she rounded a bend in the stream. Once she looked around and the face of the dense, many-colored forest, from the smoky pillars of light which penetrated the foliage to dark fissures of slumbering gloom, astonished the little girl. Awed for a moment, she quickly remembered the toy and ran on with all her strength.
An entire hour had passed in this seemingly futile, anxious pursuit when with surprise and relief Asole saw that the trees ahead were thinning out to reveal an expanse of the sea, white clouds, and a stretch of yellow sand onto which she ran, nearly stumbling with fatigue. Here was the mouth of the stream. Spreading out not very broadly and so shallow one could see through the streaming azure to the stones on its bed, it melted into the oncoming ocean waves. From the low bluff, pockmarked with roots. Asole saw that at the stream's edge, on a big flat stone, with his back to her, there sat a man holding the toy sloop in his hands. He was looking it over carefully from all sides with the same curiosity that an elephant might show toward a butterfly. Partially reassured by the fact that the toy was still in one piece. Asole clambered down the bluff. Coming up close behind the stranger, she studied him carefully, waiting for him to look up. But the stranger was so absorbed in contemplation of the surprise that had come from out of nowhere that the little girl had time to inspect him carefully and to decide that he was unlike anyone she had ever seen.
Before her was none other than Egl, the famous wandering collector of songs, legends, traditions, and folk stories. Gray curls dangled from under his straw hat. A gray blouse, tucked into dark blue trousers, and high boots gave him the look of a hunter. A white collar, a necktie, a buckle studded with silver, a cane, and a pouch with a new nickel lock, all these indicated a city dweller. A nose, lips, and eyes peered from a luxuriant growth of beard and a handlebar mustache. A kind of faded pallor would have dominated his features had it not been for eyes as gray as sand and as bright as shining steel which looked out at one with a bold, firm gaze.
"All right, now you can give it back to me," exclaimed the little girl bravely. "You've played with it enough. How did you manage to catch it?"
Egl raised his head and at once dropped the litde boat, so surprised was he by the unexpected voice. The old chap studied her for a minute, smiled, and slowly ran his large hand, marked by heavy veins, through his beard. The calico dress she wore was faded from many washings, and it didn't even reach the lmees of her thin, sunbumed legs.
Her thick dark locks, which had been tied up in a lace kerchief, had tumbled down over her shoulders. The expression of her face was as airy and clean-cut as the flight of a swallow. The touch of sad questioning in her dark eyes made them somewhat older than the rest of her face. Its slightly asymmetrical oval had the kind of lovely sun-flush that comes only to a healthy, fair skin. Her tiny, half-open mouth shone with a gentle smile.

"I swear by the Brothers Grimm, Aesop, and Hans Christian Andersen," proclaimed Egl, with his eyes darting back and forth from the little girl to the toy sloop, "this is something special! Listen here, you little weed! Is this yours?"

"I ran after it all the way down the stream, till I thought I would die. It was right here?" "At my very feet. A shipwreck which gives me, as beach pirate, the chance to offer you my booty. This sloop, abandoned by its crew, was cast up on the sand by a five-inch wave between my left heel and the tip of my walking stick." He thumped the ground with his cane. "And what's your name, little one?" "Asole," she said, placing the toy Egl handed her back into her basket.

"Very good," continued the old man in his strange manner, without taking his eyes from her. In their depths gleamed a smile of friendliness. "There was no real reason to ask your name. I like it because it is so unusual, so musical, and also all in one tone like the whistle of an arrow, or the roar of a sea shell. Wouldn't it have been awful if you had told me you had one of those fine-sounding but intolerably ordinary names so out-of-tune with the Beautiful Unknown? I have no wish to know who you are, who your parents are, or where you live. Why disturb enchantment? Here I was sitting on this rock comparing Finnish and Japanese folk themes. And out of nowhere the stream cast up this toy sloop, and right after it you appeared. Just as you are. And I, my dear,am a poet at heart, even if I have never written any poetry of my own. What do you have there in your basket?"

"Toy boats," said Asole, shaking her basket. "There is also a steamer and three little houses with flags, where soldiers live." "Very good. You were sent to sell them. On the way you began to play. You put the sloop into the water to sail a bit and it sailed away. Is that right?" "How could you have seen?" Asole asked doubtingly, trying to remember whether she hadn't told him herself, "Did someone tell you? Or did you guess?" "I knew." "How?" "Because I am-the chief of all the sorcerers."
Asole started. Her uneasiness, when she heard Egl's words, bordered on fright. The deserted seashore, the absolute quiet, the exhausting chase for the sailboat, the strange words of the old man with sparlding eyes, his majestic beard and hair were beginning to create a confusion between reality and the supernatural in the mind of the small girl. If even for one second Egl had made a face or raised his voice, she would have fled in tears and panic. But Egl had already noticed how wide her eyes were. "Don't be afraid of me," he said seriously. "In fact I want to speak to you frankly."
He had just defined to his own satisfaction exactly what there was in the girl's face that had so insistently etched itself on his mind. It was the unconscious expectation of a beautiful, a blessed destiny, he had decided. Oh why had he not been born a writer? What a glorious theme!

In Egl the instinct for the creation of legends, a result of his profession, was stronger than the need for caution in casting onto unknown soil the seeds of a great day-dream. Having begun, he had to continue:
"Come here. Asole, and listen to me with care. I have just come from that village in which you no doubt live, Caperna. I love folk tales and songs and I sat there a whole day in that village waiting to hear something new, a story I had not heard before. But there in your village they tell no legends, and they sing no songs. And if they do relate anything at all, it's, as one might ex- pect, one of those familiar anecdotes about shrewd peasants and soldiers, glorifying cheating and thievery. If they sing anything at all, they chant silly ditties as dirty as unwashed feet and as crude as stomach rumblings, with awful tunes. But I've gone off the track. I'll have to begin again."
Pausing a moment, he continued: "I really don't know how many years will go by, but in Capema a legend will come to flower that will be remembered a long time. You will be grown. Asole. And one day, far out to sea, the sun will shine upon a white ship with scarlet sails. The white ship will slice through the waves and move right toward you. The miracle ship will sail silently forward without shouts or shots. On the shore many people will be gathered, exclaiming in astonishment. You will be there too. The ship will approach majestically amidst the sounds of beautiful music. A fast sldff, gilded and decorated as for a holiday, with oriental rugs and flowers will be lowered from it. 'Why have you come? Whom do you want?' the people on the shore will ask. Just then you will see a bold and handsome prince. He will reach out his arms to you. 'Hello, Asole!' he will say. "ln a faraway land I saw you in my dreams and I have come to take you away with me forever to my kingdom. You will live there with me in a deep valley of roses. You will have everything you wish for. We will live together, you and I, in such friendship and joy that you will never know tears or sadness.' Then he will help you into the skiff, take you to his ship, and you will leave forever for a splendid country where the sun will rise and the stars will descend from the heavens to greet you when you come."
"All this will happen to me?" the little girl asked quietly.
Her serious eyes grew gay and shone with faith. If the sorcerer were dangerous he wouldn't talk like that. This was clear. She drew closer to him.
"Perhaps it's already here-that ship?"
"Oh no, not yet," Egl said. "First, as I told you, you must grow up. And only then . . . How shall I say it? It will happen. That's all there is to it. And what will you do then?" "I?" and she looked down into her basket but evidently she found nothing there which she considered a good enough gift for Egl. "I would love him," she declared quickly and added hesitating slightly, "that is, if he doesn't fight." "No, he won't fight," declared the sorcerer, winking in a knowing way. "That he won't do that I'll guarantee. Run along, little girl, and don't you forget what I've told you. Run along and peace be on your tender head!"

Half an hour later the beggar sat in the local tavern at a table with a dozen fishermen. Be- hind them, pulling at their husbands' drinking arms and sometimes even grabbing the mugs for a drink themselves, sat great, buxom women, as rounded as cobblestones, with bushy brows and arms thick as logs. The beggar was boiling with outrage as he spoke.
"So he refused me tobacco. 'When you come of age,' he tells her, 'then there'll come a special red ship. For you. It's your lot to marry a prince.So just believe in that sorcerer.' And I say: 'Wake her up, wake her up, and get me some tobacco.' And then he chased me half the way here.""Who? What? What's he talking about?" questioned the curious women.
The fishermen, hardly turning their heads, gabbled, half laughing, "Longren and his daughter have really gone wild. Maybe they're soft in the head. The man says that apparently some magician was at their place. They're waiting-listen, you old girls, here's one for you- for a foreign prince and a ship with red sails."
Three days later on the way back from the shop in Lisse, Asole heard for the first time: "Hey you, you witch! Asole! Look over there! See the red sails!" The trembling little girl involuntarily shaded her eyes with her palm and peered out at the ocean. Then she turned in the direction of the taunts. Twenty steps away from her stood a pack of urchins. They made faces and stuck out their tongues at her. Sobbing, she ran home.