Children of the moor

It is a year of famine up in Norrland.[1] ‘A year of famine’ means that one is almost without food in those places where the flock of children is large and the bit of ground sma...

It began to grow dark, and still the children were in the woods. Andy was more and more inclined to stop and listen to their chatter, even if it was so full of grumbling and com...

And yet Magnus was missing. He insisted that he couldn’t very well leave the goat out there alone. Really he thought it only right that Andy should receive the first blow among...

The little girls were awake earliest of all in the morning. That is, except the Spectacle Man, Ladd-Pelle[6] as he was otherwise called when he was sober, and who made really wo...

The uneasiness and troubled spirits in the cottage changed to real happiness when Andy and Golden Horn came in again. Anna-Lisa got more than a quart of foamy warm milk from the...

The children had stayed with the Spectacle Man two whole days. They laughed at themselves when they told him how he had scared them at first: he who was pure kindness and fun.

The little group of children passing through the mountain village attracted little attention. It was altogether too common a sight in those hard times to see whole starving hous...

Anna-Lisa quieted and calmed Brita-Carrie with baby talk and a little warm milk. The little one, now youngest, was tucked in solidly on the sled. Maglena, for safety’s sake, now...

Forester Kronhjort[7] was on the way home on exactly the same road over which the children had plodded the last days. He had passed close to the little gray cottage up in Barren...

Eight days later the children came slowly, with tired, dragging feet, up the steep hill toward the bright red house where the forester lived. It was a little by-way off the main...

When the Barren Moor children set out again from the forester’s home, they were only five. Brita-Carrie had been allowed to stay with the little sister. So the two little maids...

When the rest of the children went on their way, they were no longer so unhappy. They had so many wonderful things to talk about. First of all about the lovely lady with the gen...

When the children, a few days later, had emerged from the poorest of the mountain districts, they came one evening to a farm where sickness and sorrow reigned. It was a big rich...

‘I don’t know what to say. I suppose it would be hard for them not to have any one to worry over, and keep after, now that the little girls were left at the forester’s.’

‘Ugh, it’s just exactly as if we were all alone in the whole world,’ said Maglena, and drew closer about her the little home-woven shawl she had been given by Mistress Brita Dea.

Magnus slept as he sat on the sled and rested his tired, strained bones and sinews. Kitty slept and rested deathly frightened nerves, and limbs twisted almost out of joint. Owls...

They came to the ‘wedding-farm.’ The doors stood open and the air within was steamy with heat. Outside the windows stood crowds of people. They were peeking in to see the bride.

It was a troop of men and boys who, with shirts spotted with red paint on top of their clothes, came stealthily up to the ‘wedding-farm.’ They had scarecrow faces of birch-bark,...

‘It was a little hard to leave grandfather. But I got this from him.’ Andy’s eyes shone as he held up the silver watch that actually ticked and kept good time, as he spread the...

‘It is soon morning, I feel that ’cause I feel just like working. Funny the moon isn’t higher. It was just a little above the mountain when I was out. If it isn’t going down, ma...

The children woke up early in the morning, long before the sun was up. It was very cold so early in the morning, so they crept down under the cover again.

‘What in the world, boy!’ said Maglena. Her eyes darkened with fear and her lips trembled. But quickly and carefully she packed into the knapsack everything that she had taken o...

It was the head, the horns of a _reindeer_ that now appeared before Andy’s frightened eyes: a reindeer that flew past him with beating hoofs and big black frightened eyes and co...

Lapp-Mattes gave an echoing cry: a strange, penetrating shriek as if from the throat and the palate together. One who had never heard such a sound before would have thought that...

Days and weeks had gone since that morning in the spring when the children from Barren Moor had parted from their old friends, the Lapp Mattes Klip and his family. Before then,...

So the children went on toward the more closely settled districts. They came to farms where order and happiness reigned, where work went with a vim, and newly woven linen bleach...

Magnus was chattering with Golden Horn and pulling grass for her when he was unexpectedly called up to the young pair who sat on the bench. When asked if he would like to stay t...

Then came the question of the goat. The man wondered if Andy wanted to sell them the goat. The squire had promised that he could have two sheep on the place, and instead he coul...

The farms lay so close together thus far down in the settlements that Andy and Maglena, who were now without Magnus, began to long for the woods where they thought they could li...

It was high summer. The fields were like brides clad in blossoming clover, camomile, daisies, and blue-bells. Wild strawberries and ‘arctic raspberries’ shone bright red along t...

Andy had just begun with ‘Our text shall be--’ when he was interrupted and silenced by a frightful crashing noise of dry roots being broken and branches being snapped off. A sou...

Andy and Maglena stood still on the stone. They began to scream, and call, and to try to yodel themselves, so cheered were they by the beautiful sounds that echoed through the w...

All the children were at last in bed and asleep. But it was terribly provoking for six of them to wake up in the late afternoon on Sunday and find the house empty of people. Sti...

‘The church people’ had come from all directions; some had had a long way to come. They had sought roundabout ways between the tree-trunks and around small bogs. Now they sat in...

Andy, who had stood singing with his eyes still lifted toward the late evening sun, gradually regained his eyesight. And what he saw brought him to earth. It was the district mi...

Out in the woods the minister walked alone. As usual he wanted to find the crystal-clear spring that he knew was near by. As he approached the spring silently in the soft moss,...

Maglena came running into the cottage, but stopped, silent and embarrassed, just inside the door. She was relieved to see Andy, quite calm and at home, sitting on a three-legged...

Little Maglena now heard the same story that Andy had just heard, partly from the minister, and partly from his wife, the story of himself and his brothers and sisters. Their lo...