Westerval seldom slept for more than a couple of hours, and never before the morning came. His bedchamber was the strangest place in the strange house. She probably thought it miserable and bleak out there but Westerval did not-he loved the sea and the solitude. Westerval lived alone in the house, together with his housekeeper. And they came to him with everything-conches, corals, strange fish, and star fish, and they got got coffee and tobacco for their trouble. Westerval kept a lively trade going with the fishermen he had as good as all of them in his pocket. Away in a corner lay some sea eagles and a couple of snowy owls, and just above these were nailed a number of otter and cormorant skins with the fatty side out. Barrels full of eiderdown stood around about, and on the wall hung hundreds of auks, puffins, eiders, gulls, and terns. Here lay flagons, sacks of flour, rope, barrels of pitch, and stockfish stacked in great heaps. In the main building there was also a warehouse with doors and lifts. Here one had to go up through a square hole, whilst the boat lay moored to the ladder beneath the planks of the wharf. The wharf followed the house along the mountainside, and was full of hanging stockfish. A host of steps and ladders led from the opening in the floor, down to the sea, and some fishermen always lay down there, fiddling in their boats. To ease the traffic of the fishermen, one side of the building was built against the smooth mountain, whilst the other side stood on beams, overhanging the sea itself. The house he lived in was one of the strangest one can think of. It was therefore just as well he had grown so careful recently, for he hardly ever went in a boat any more. But twice had he sailed his boat out of his depth, and folk said that he had been told that the third time would see him remain there. He was known as an unusually capable skipper at sea. Otherwise, he was a heavy-set man, with cropped snow-white hair and pale, inanimate features-as kind and as soft-hearted as a child, but also as obstinate as a buck, when in a pinch. There was always something weighing upon him, something sorrowful. He ran a trading post out there, and was held to be a moderate man, but also a strange one, one whom no one could quite figure out. He is dead and gone now, but many will perhaps remember him. In a fishing village, far out by the sea, lived Kristian Westerval.
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