"This is Graham bread, I suppose," said Laybold, as he took a slice of the coarse brown bread. "Bah! it's sour."
It always is; and both the students rejected it, though they ate a hearty meal of white bread, herring, salmon, and sausage.
"Now, how much?" asked Scott, when they were ready to go.
"One rigsdaler and fifty öre each--three rigsdalers in all."
"Cheap enough," said Scott. "Two lodgings and two breakfasts for eighty-one cents."
The students walked through the lane in which they had made their devious way the night before, to the main street on the canal. At the landing-place there were no boats belonging to the squadron, and everything looked exceedingly quiet on board of the ship. Seating themselves on the pier, with their legs hanging over the water, they decided to wait till a boat came to the shore.
"We shall catch it for this," said Laybold.
"No more liberty for a month at least," said Scott, shrugging his shoulders after his fashion.
"I don't think it's fair. We didn't mean to get drunk, and didn't know what 'finkel' was," added Laybold. "I don't half like to go on board again."
"Nor I; but I suppose we must face the music," answered Scott, dubiously. "I'm glad we didn't go on board while we were boozy. The fellows would have laughed at us for a year, if we had."
"That's so; and Lowington would have put us in the brig."
"I don't exactly like to explain the reason why we didn't go on board last night; I always was a bashful fellow."
"You didn't go with the others," said a man, coming up to them at this moment, and speaking in broken English.
"The other students. They took the steamer up the canal at two o'clock this morning."
"Whew!" whistled Scott. "We have lost Göta Canal and the falls."
"They will return to-night by the railroad from Wenersberg," added the man, who was an agent of the canal steamers.
"That's too bad!" exclaimed Laybold, as the man walked away.
"I don't know that it is too bad. Our leave would have been stopped if we had gone on board," laughed Scott, who generally took the most cheerful view of any disagreeable subject. "Why can't we go on our own hook?"
But inquiring of the agent, they learned that the canal steamers left only at two o'clock in the morning.