N. de Bertrand Lugrin

“ The school-children had dubbed Eric a bit of a coward, wherein they made a great mistake, though they are no wiser than many older people who cannot tell the difference between proud sensitiveness and silly, shrinking timidity. Swedie had as brave a heart as any of the other little Yukon boys, but because they misjudged him he scorned to show them otherwise, and because he could only speak their language in a halting, nervous way he kept much to himself. If he had been at home in Norway with his own little people, he would have led them all in sport and in his classes as well. ”

“ By and by the weeping wind, afraid of its own voice, perhaps, died away altogether, and the Malemutes, missing it, and growing tired, ended their wailing also. It was very still, with the stillness of intense cold, and every one in Fortymile was sleeping, for it was past midnight; every one with the exception of “Swedie.”
Inside the little cabin a fire burned fiercely in the heater, and on the coonskin-covered couch beside it little Swedie sat with Viking, his Great Dane dog, and he talked to him in the tongue the boy loved, but alas! ”

“ But here he felt himself an alien, almost an outcast; and it hurt him all the more because he hid the hurt beneath his proud little exterior, and carried his curly head high,even when the red mantled his cheek in a cruelly hot flush at bearing the laughter at his many mistakes. ”

“ But it was not so; perhaps because he did net quite understand, or perhaps because he was a little like a long-ago ancestor after whom Viking was named, “great in temptation and impervious to vanity.” At all events, the night he saved his father’s life was the beginning of a new life to Eric himself. When, next summer, he and his father and the dogs went home to Norway, all the lads of the town agreed that they had never missed a comrade as much as they missed Swedie. ”