Master Alaric was a short, thin, but lively man, who never rested a moment. His face, of which his turned_up nose was the only prominent feature, marked with smallpox, was pale as death. His hair was gray and shaggy, his eyes small, but they glanced perpetually about on all sides. He saw everything, criticized everything, knew everything best, and was always in the right. When he went into the streets, he moved his arms about as if he were rowing, and once he struck the pail of a girl so high in the air that he himself was wetted all over by the water she was carrying.

  "Idiot!" Alaric cried, shaking himself. "Could you not see that I was coming behind you!"

  By trade Alaric was a shoemaker, and when he worked he pulled his thread out with such force that he drove his fist into everyone who did not keep far enough off. No apprentice stayed more than a month with him, for he had always some fault to find with the very best work. At one time it was that the stitches were not even, at another that one shoe was too long, or one heel higher than the other, or the leather not cut large enough.

  "Wait," Alaric said to his apprentice, "I will soon show you how we make skins soft."
He brought a strap and gave the apprentice a couple of lashes across the back. He called them all sluggards. He himself did not turn much work out of his hands, for he never sat still for a quarter of an hour. If his wife got up very early in the morning and lighted the fire, Alaric jumped out of bed, and ran barefooted into the kitchen, crying:

  "Will you burn my house down for me! That is a fire to roast an ox. Does wood cost nothing?"
If the servants were standing by their wash_tubs and laughing, and telling each other what they knew, Alaric scolded them, saying:

  "There stand the geese cackling, and forgetting their work, to gossip. And why fresh soap? Disgraceful extravagance and shameful idleness into the bargain! They want to save their hands, and not rub the things properly."

  Alaric would run out and knock over a pail full of soap and water, so that the whole kitchen was flooded.

  Someone was building a new house, so Alaric hurried to the window to look on.

  "There! They are using that red sand_stone again that never dries!" he complained. "No one will ever be healthy in that house. And just look how badly the fellows are laying the stones. Besides, the mortar is good for nothing. It ought to have gravel in it, not sand. I shall live to see that house tumble down on the people who are in it."

  He sat down, put a couple of stitches in, and then jumped up again, unfastened his leather_apron, and cried:

  "I will just go out, and appeal to those men's consciences."

  He stumbled on the carpenters.

  "What's this?" Alaric carped. "You are not working by the line. Do you expect the beams to be straight _ one wrong will put all wrong."
Alaric snatched an axe out of a carpenter's hand and wanted to show him how he ought to cut, but just then a cart loaded with clay caught his eye. Alaric threw the axe away, and hastened to the peasant who was walking by the side of the cart.

  "You are not in your right mind! Who yokes young horses to a heavily_laden cart? The poor beasts will die on the spot."

  The peasant did not give him an answer, and Alaric in a rage ran back into his work_shop. When he was setting himself to work again, the apprentice reached him a shoe.

  "Well, what's that again?" screamed Alaric. "Haven't I told you you ought not to cut shoes so broad? Who would buy a shoe like this, which is hardly anything else but a sole! I insist on my orders being followed exactly!"

  "Master," answered the apprentice, "you may easily be quite right about the shoe being a bad one, but it is the one which you yourself cut out, and yourself set to work at. When you jumped up a while ago, you knocked it off the table, and I have only just picked it up. An Aesir from Asgard, however, would never make you believe that."

  One night, master Alaric dreamed he was carried by Valkyrie to Asgard. When he reached there, he knocked loudly at the door.

  "I wonder," said Alaric to himself, "that they have no knocker on the door, one knocks one's knuckles sore."

  Heimdall opened the door, and wanted to see who demanded admission so noisily.

  "Ah, it's you, master Alaric," said Heimdall. "Well, I'll let you in, but I warn you that you must give up that habit of yours, and find fault with nothing you see in Asgard, or you may fare ill."

  "You might have spared your warning," answered Alaric. "I know already what is seemly, and here, Odin be thanked, everything is perfect, and there is nothing to blame as there is in Midgard."

  So he went in, and walked up and down the wide expanses of Asgard. He looked around him, to the left and to the right, but sometimes shook his head, or muttered something to himself.
Then Alaric saw two Aesir who were carrying away a salt_grinder. It was the salt_grinder which Mundilfari had dropped into the sea and which had turned the sea to salt_water. They did not carry the salt_grinder lengthways, however, but obliquely.

  "Did anyone ever see such a piece of stupidity?" thought master Alaric.

  He said nothing, and seemed satisfied with it.

  "It comes to the same thing after all, whichever way they carry the salt_grinder, straight or athwart, if they only get along with it, and truly I do not see them knock against anything."

  Soon after this Alaric saw two Aesir who were drawing water out of a well into a bucket, but at the same time he observed that the bucket was full of holes, and that the water was running out of it on every side. They were watering the earth with rain.

  "Hang it!" he exclaimed, but happily recollected himself, and thought: "Perhaps it is only a pastime. If it is an amusement, then it seems they can do useless things of this kind, especially here in Asgard, where people, as I have already noticed, do nothing but idle about."

  He went farther and saw a cart which had stuck fast in a deep hole.

  "It's no wonder," said Alaric to the Aes who stood by. "Who would load so unreasonably? What have you there?"

  "A job_lot of human destinies, for the Norns," replied the Aes. "I could not get on the right way with it, but still I have pushed it safely up here, and here they won't leave me stuck. In fact an Aes did come and harness two horses to it."

  "That's quite right," thought Alaric, "but two horses won't get that cart out _ it must have four to move it."

  Another Aes came and brought two more horses; she did not harness them in front of it, however, but behind. That was too much for master Alaric.

  "Clumsy creature!" he burst out. "What are you doing there? Has anyone ever since the world began seen a cart drawn in that way? But you, in your conceited arrogance, think that you know everything best!"

  He was going to say more, but one of the Aesir seized him by the throat and pushed him forth with irresistible strength. Beneath the gateway master Alaric turned his head round to take one more look at the cart, and saw that it was being raised into the air by four winged horses.

  At this moment master Alaric awoke.

  "Things are certainly arranged in Asgard otherwise than they are in Midgard," said he to himself, "and that excuses much, but who can see horses harnessed both behind and before with patience? To be sure they had wings but who could know that? It is, beside, great folly to fix a pair of wings to a horse that has four legs to run with already. But I must get up, or else they will make nothing but mistakes in my house.

  "It is a lucky thing though, that I was not really in Asgard! Lucky for the Aesir, that is!"


Based on Master Pfriem