VOLUME XIV

[Symbol: Asterism]

THE FAMILY AT GILJE

BY JONAS LIE

ESTABLISHED BY NIELS POULSON

THE FAMILY AT GILJE A DOMESTIC STORY OF THE FORTIES

BY JONAS LIE

TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN BY SAMUEL COFFIN EASTMAN WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JULIUS EMIL OLSON

NEW YORK THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN FOUNDATION LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1920

_Copyright, 1920, by The American-Scandinavian Foundation_

_D. B. Updike · The Merrymount Press · Boston · U.S.A._

_Preface_

To the Honorable Samuel Coffin Eastman, of Concord, New Hampshire, belongs the credit of having given American readers an English version of _The Family at Gilje_ while the author was still at the height of his creative activity. Mr. Eastman, who was a lawyer by profession, was a man of varied interests, the author of a White Mountain Guide which has gone through numerous editions, and the translator of Brandes's _Impressions of Russia_ and _Poland_. He was familiar with the translations by Mrs. Ole Bull of Jonas Lie's _The Pilot and His Wife_ and _The Good Ship Future_. _The Family at Gilje_ was called to his attention by Miss Amalia Krohg, of Christiania, and it charmed him so much that he rendered it into English. The translation appeared serially in the Concord magazine, _The Granite Monthly_, in 1894, and was illustrated with views from Valders, the mountain district where the scene of the story is laid.

When the Committee on Publications decided to include _The Family at Gilje_ in the SCANDINAVIAN CLASSICS, their attention was called to Mr. Eastman's excellent version, and permission was secured to reprint it. The translator consented to a revision of his text so as to make it conform to the general style of the CLASSICS and to interpret more accurately some of the Norwegian idioms. His death, in 1917, prevented his coöperation in the work of revision, to which, nevertheless, he had given his cordial assent.

HANNA ASTRUP LARSEN

_Introduction_

The story of Jonas Lie's life, even though told in brief, will readily yield the key to the various phases of his strange authorship. No one of his long list of books is an adequate index of his powers. The special character of each is the outgrowth of peculiar traits of natural endowment in conjunction with definite facts and experiences of his life. Some of the features of his genius seem strangely incongruous--as different as day and night. These features are clearly reflected in his writings. By critics he has been variously proclaimed "the poet of Nordland," "the novelist of the sea," or "the novelist of Norwegian homes," and is commonly classed as a realist. His reputation and great popularity rest mainly upon his realistic novels. In this field he ranks as one of the leading portrayers of character and social conditions in modern Norse literature; and of his realism _The Family at Gilje_ is possibly the best illustration.

Yet there was much more than an ingenuous realist in Lie.[1] He was also a fascinating mystic; a teller of fantastic stories, profoundly symbolic in character; a great myth-making _raconteur_ of grotesque tales that have a distinct folkloristic flavor, particularly as found in his two volumes entitled _Trold_. This part of his authorship, though it does not bulk large, and, naturally enough, has not been fathomed by the general reader, is nevertheless a very important part, and is surely the most original and poetic. It appears in a definite though restrained form as mystic romanticism in his first prose work, _Second Sight_, and then scarcely a trace of it is seen until it bursts forth, twenty years later, with the vigor of long-repressed passion.

It would therefore be unfair to judge Jonas Lie by the single novel in hand--as unfair as it would be to judge Ibsen by a single one of his social dramas--_The Pillars of Society_, for instance. In Ibsen the imaginative power displayed in _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_ did not in the social dramas reassert itself in anything but an adumbration of the abandon and exuberance of the dramatic poems. In Lie, however, the mystic and myth-maker reappeared with strength redoubled. Erik Lie, in a book on his father's life (_Oplevelser_), says with reference to this: "If it had been given to Jonas Lie to continue his authorship in his last years, his Nordland nature would surely--such is my belief--more and more have asserted itself, and he would have dived down into the misty world of the subconscious, where his near-sighted eyes saw so clearly, and whence his first works sprang up like fantastic plants on the bottom of the sea." There is not a trace or an inkling of this clairvoyant power in _The Family at Gilje_. Its excellences are of a distinctly different nature.

This much, then, must be said to warn the reader against a too hasty appraisement of Lie's genius--his power, range, and vision--on the basis of a single novel. Let him be assured that Jonas Lie stands worthily by the side of Ibsen and Björnson both as a creative author and as a personality. He was of their generation, knew them both well as young men and old, and was a loyal friend to both, as they were to him. He even knew Björnson well enough in the early sixties to give him pointed advice on his authorship. Though he seems never to have taken such liberties with Ibsen,--as Björnson so categorically did during the same decade,--he did lend him a helping hand by paying him in advance for the dramatic poem, _Love's Comedy_, published in a periodical owned by Lie. It is interesting to note that Ibsen, so punctilious in later years, was aggravatingly slow in forwarding the final batch of manuscript. As a last resource, Lie threatened to complete the drama himself. Later in life, during summer sojourns in the Bavarian Alps, they saw much of each other. In one of his social dramas, _An Enemy of the People_, Ibsen used Lie, together with traits of Björnson and Apothecary Thaulow (father of the painter) as a model for the genial hero, Dr. Stockmann. Both Ibsen and Björnson were generous in their praise of Lie's many fine qualities. In the sixties, before Lie had written a single novel, Björnson, in an address at Tromsö, in Arctic Norway, where Lie had spent several years of his boyhood, said some striking things about Lie's creative powers. On a later occasion he referred to him as "the great vague possibility," and after Lie's death, in a letter to the family, he said: "I have so much to thank him for. In the luxuriant wealth of my youth he was the purest in heart, the richest in fancy." Björnson understood from the first the clairvoyant mysticism in Lie, and profited by it. In other words, a man who could interest men like Ibsen and Björnson and maintain their admiration and respect for half a century could do so only by dint of rare personal powers.

Although he did not begin his literary career until he was getting on toward forty, at which age both Ibsen and Björnson had won fame, Lie, it may fairly be said, eventually overtook them in the favor of the Scandinavian reading public, and it is not unlikely that with this public he will hold his own in comparison with them. This is surely due to the realism of his social novels. Though he at times roamed far afield from the standards of realism, as has been indicated, he never was identified with extremists in any literary school, despite the sweeping force of popular currents. As a realist he was a patient plodder, following his own instincts, and in the course of long years he hammered out a literary vehicle distinctly his own, so surcharged, in fact, with the idiosyncrasies of his individuality as to make it most difficult to recast in a foreign idiom.

From the above it will appear that Lie was an interesting dual personality. Further consideration of his life will show that he was both romanticist, or mystic, and realist by right of blood, as well as through environment and personal experience.

Scandinavian romanticism began in Denmark with the opening of the nineteenth century, as a revival of the past, the exploitation of Northern antiquities for modern literary material. In Norway, a generation or so later, romanticism grew out of an enthusiastic study of popular ballads and folk-lore stories still found on the lips of the peasantry. In connection with this there developed an intense interest in rural scenery and life on the part of both artists and poets. The movement continued for a generation, until the early seventies, and found its best conscious literary expression in Björnson's peasant idyls. When Jonas Lie had resolved to become an author (1870), there was one region of romantic inspiration that had not been utilized. This was Nordland, one of the northerly provinces of Norway, beyond the Arctic Circle, under the glory of the midnight sun, where, however, a long and sunless winter fostered in the minds of the inhabitants a brooding melancholy which peopled mountain and sea, nature's every nook and cranny, with strange and awe-inspiring creatures. In this nature of colossal contrasts Jonas Lie spent several years of his boyhood, and the tremendous impression left on his sensitive and poetic mind are very evident in his first novel, _Second Sight_ (_Den Fremsynte_), also known in English as _The Visionary_ and _The Seer_. This, together with some lesser stories that followed, gave the Nordland stamp to Lie's earliest fiction--the stamp of romanticism, mysticism, and clairvoyance. The effect of this environment was accentuated by powerful innate impulses, for his ancestral heritage reveals a double strain, to which allusion has already been made. On his father's side there were, for several generations, brains, energy, and good sense, with a predilection for law and administration. The father himself was a country magistrate of sterling uprightness. Here, then, plainly enough, is the source of the novelist's realism, as found, for example, in _The Family at Gilje_, but nothing whatever to indicate the poet and romancer. These surely can be traced to the mother, who was a most remarkable woman, born in one of the northern provinces, and, as Lie himself believed, with either Finnish (_i.e._, Lappic) or Gypsy blood in her veins, and possibly both. Professor Boyesen, in _Essays on Scandinavian Literature_, says of Lie's mother: "I remember well this black-eyed, eccentric little lady, with her queer ways and still more extraordinary conversation. It is from her that Jonas Lie has inherited the fantastic strain in his blood, the strange superstitious terrors, and the luxuriant wealth of color which he lavished upon his first novel, _The Man of Second Sight_. She was unusually gifted intellectually, had pronounced literary interests, and revealed some decided clairvoyant qualities." Lie himself said of her: "There was something of a seer in her--something that reminded one of spae-women and the like." "Imagine," says Arne Garborg,[2] in his book on Lie, "this restless blood infused into the strong, sober, practical nature of the Lies: what should come of such a mixture but that peculiar combination of reality and romanticism that we know by the name of Jonas Lie, the poet of Finnish magic and sorcery--and of plain reality." In Nordland, where his maternal inheritance had its source, Lie as a boy found things fit to satisfy the cravings of such an imagination as the Finn in him possessed. In this Brobdingnagian realm he heard tales and legends of Finnish sorcery, of shipwrecks caused by fierce water-bogies (_draugs_), of giant trolls, and a thousand other demoniacal creatures of morbid popular fancy, until he was chilled with terror, the effects of which clung to him for life, made him as a mature man afraid of the dark, and finally cropped out in tales of weird and grotesque imagery.

These, then, are the fundamental facts that are necessary for comprehension of the duality in Lie's nature and authorship.

Jonas Lie was born in southern Norway, in 1833, and at the age of five removed with the family to Nordland. His life as an author began in 1870; but between these dates there was a period of very unusual experiences. His vivid imagination, stirred by the witchery of life in Nordland, made the prosy tasks of school seem direst punishment. He was counted a dullard and an incorrigible mischief-maker. At the age of thirteen it was his passion to become a sailor. The father, at his wits' end, compromised by sending him to a naval academy. Here he was at times thought mad by his instructors, who saw something of his semi-somnambulistic antics. Near-sightedness, however, proved an obstacle to his continuance in _this_ path to maritime glory, which he was destined to win by a different route. After an awakening experience in a Bergen school, where an eccentric poet-pedagogue thought him a "lad of pairts," and his classmates voted him a prize liar on account of his Nordland stories, he took a short cut to the university at Heltberg's so-called Student Factory in Christiania, the head-master of which--a prodigy who has been immortalized in literature by both Björnson and Garborg--proved an inspiring and fructifying force to his groping genius. At this institution, among a motley horde of country bumpkins, shipwrecked city talent, and budding genius, he found Björnson, also preparing for the university. Both were profoundly impressed by the genius of the asthmatic head-master in his dogskin jacket, who led his young barbarians by forced marches through the Alpine passes of Latin syntax into the classic domain of Livy and Horace. We shall see that he came to Lie's rescue at a later period.

Lie entered the university in 1851, and took a degree in law in 1858. It had been a difficult task for him to decide what professional study to pursue. He thought at first that he had leanings toward theology, bought the necessary books, kept them a day, then exchanged them for law books, after having paid a brief but adequate visit to the clinical laboratory. These years at the university, when a romantic interest in everything Norwegian filled the air with mystic expectancy of great things to come in the way of a regenerated Norway, aroused Lie. Association with Björnson, Ibsen, Vinje,[3] Nordraak,[4] and a score of other gifted young men was stimulating, yet he did not become a disciple or slavish follower of any of these more vehement natures. He had his own ideas, and was boldly independent when occasion demanded it, as both King Oscar and Björnson later in life ascertained to their discomfort, each of them having tried in vain to make the "amiable" author conform to their plans and ideas. Among the many friends that Lie made in the capital city during his university days, Björnson became the most intimate. He seems from the very first to have espied the artist in Lie, and did much to help him in understanding his own strange self. It had begun to worry Lie that his friends thought him eccentric. And not only this: the mystic, superstitious, magic-loving Finn in his nature often frightened him. Hence he made great efforts to counteract his tendency to fantastic musing and to develop his paternal heritage: the rationalist and realist in himself. For this purpose the determination to study law was doubtless a wise step. But his legal studies did not suppress his literary yearnings, which found expression in verse that did not at first go beyond a circle of intimate friends. He saw no prospect of making a living with his pen, and so entered a government office--a decision hastily made under pressure of respect for his stern and practical father, who had announced a visit to the capital city. Nevertheless, he dreamed of becoming an author, and began contributing poems to the daily press. They seemed labored and heavy, and attracted no particular attention. On the other hand, he prepared some well-written articles on European politics, which indicated insight and careful thinking. These articles made such a favorable impression on Björnson that he offered to secure him the editorship of a Christiania daily. But Lie was unwilling. He had made arrangements to practise law at Kongsvinger, not far from the capital. After a year's work in the new field, he married a cousin, Thomasine Lie, to whom he had long been betrothed. Together they had planned that he was to be an author, and his hasty decision to become a lawyer was a severe shock to her. From the beginning she had faith in his literary possibilities; and it was evidently her steady hand on the rudder, throughout a long life, that guided the bark of his genius through many dangerous reefs. But for her good sense and loving loyalty, there would probably not have been a Jonas Lie in Norwegian literature. He often remarked that her name might well appear on the title-page of most of his books. In this most interesting partnership, his was the creative spirit, hers the practical guiding hand.

Lie's new home was in the heart of a rich timber district, which at that time was at the high tide of a tremendous business boom. Here he achieved immediate success as a lawyer. Moreover, through an influential friend, he became the financial agent of two banking houses in the capital. This gave him the opportunity--and he had the necessary courage--to take a hand in bold business enterprises on a large scale. He prospered; the future seemed roseate; he began to dream of such affluence as to enable him to devote himself to literature. Meanwhile he wrote verses for all manner of occasions, and even published a volume of these poems (1866). Both he and his wife had unusual social qualifications. She was a fine musician, a woman of character and much intellectual force, and a most competent housewife. In this home of culture many prominent men were entertained--first of all, Ole Bull, whom Lie adored. Mighty schemes for the glorification of Mother Norway were discussed as these two "visionaries" sat brewing their toddy. Björnson, too, was often there, and Sverdrup, the statesman.

Meanwhile clouds ominous of disaster appeared on the commercial horizon. The period 1865-68 witnessed the greatest financial panic that Norway had ever experienced. Lie had forebodings of a catastrophe, but too late to save himself. He had been lavish with his signature, and was tremendously involved. The crash meant more than life and death to him. It was a matter of honor, integrity, conscience. He lost everything, and was in debt to the extent of over $200,000. Lie, the lawyer, was ruined. He resolved to return to literature, for instinct urged him with "almost explosive force," to use his own phrase. As for his financial obligations, he made a monumental resolution, as did Walter Scott in a similar predicament, to pay every dollar through his authorship; and for years he dropped every penny that he did not absolutely need into that abyss of debt. Friends finally convinced him of the hopelessness of his purpose. With what a heavy heart Lie carried the tale of his bankruptcy to his faithful wife several of his novels testify. Financial crashes play no small part in his writings, and the pathetic force with which these situations are handled sounds a distinctly personal note.

With wife and children Lie returned to Christiania in the autumn of 1868--empty-handed. How he managed to keep his head above water by the aid of loyal friends like Björnson, Sverdrup, whose private secretary he was for a time, and old Heltberg, of the Student Factory, who came to engage him as a teacher of rhetoric and composition, is an interesting story which need not be told here. But through all his trials one determination was fixed and inflexible: he would make literature his life-work. It was not long before his thoughts reverted to his early experiences in Nordland. After several years of subjection to the stern reality of legal and commercial enterprise, the Finn was again asserting himself. His first novel, _Second Sight_, was the result. He read it to his wife; she thought it magnificent, but later applied the pruning-knife drastically. Then Björnson was called in. He concurred in the wife's opinion, and immediately wrote the great Copenhagen publisher, Hegel, pronouncing the novel a "sea-mew" that would fly over all the Scandinavian North, and urging hasty publication. This was in November, 1870. By Christmas the book was in the shops. In large part it purports to be the autobiography of a visionary Nordlander, who tells of his beloved home, and recounts marvellous stories of the Arctic north; but through this bead-string of episodes and descriptions there is interwoven a pathetic tale of love, love so tender, so delicate, that the words describing it seem to come tripping on tiptoe. Unpromising as the novel seems in the beginning, when one almost expects a study in the pathology of second sight, it nevertheless develops into such beauty as to make it the _Romeo and Juliet_ of Scandinavian literature.

Every step of Jonas Lie's development from this first novel to _The Family at Gilje_ (1883) is of interest to the student of literature. It was a period of hard study, careful, conscientious work, and high resolve to master his powers and to utilize his varied experiences for literary purposes, in order to be able to serve Mother Norway,--for one must never forget the intense patriotic ardor of all Norway's great writers, artists, and musicians. By the aid of a government stipend, Lie was enabled to visit Nordland and the western coast to promote his literary production, and soon afterward a second and larger stipend for the purpose of foreign travel made it possible for him to visit Rome, the Mecca of all Scandinavian artists and _literati_ of the period. There he remained more than three years, a time of fruitful toil and stimulating experience. In 1872 he sent home two books relating to life on the western and northern coast, _The Good Ship Future_, and a collection of short stories.

Lie was not content, however, to be "the poet of Nordland," as he at once had been named. His ambition was to be more national. In the broader realms of literary activity the giant figures of Ibsen and Björnson towered. They were deep in the problems of the day. How could he become national and modern? Instinct led him on in paths that unconsciously he had already trodden. In this nation of seafarers he was the first in modern literature to discover the coast-dwellers and to portray their struggles on the sea. His first book contained a description of a storm in northern waters that makes the reader hold his breath. In the volume of short stories, which in their scenes sweep along the western coast, and in _The Good Ship Future_ as well, there was a distinct odor of the sea. This was natural enough: he had spent his early years in Nordland and in Bergen, the centre of Norwegian shipping, and he loved the sea passionately. In his next novel, _The Pilot and his Wife_, he put to sea with sails hoisted to the top.

The critics apparently had not felt the sea-breezes in his first books; but in the last there blew such a lusty gale that all, both critics and public, sniffed its fresh and salty breath with keenest relish. The book was a success, which his previous novel had not quite been, and it marks the beginning of Lie's sane and natural realism as consciously applied, in its main problem, to a modern social question, making the story, in its essence, a novel of character, a psychological study of the relation of man and wife, and not primarily a novel of adventure, which assumption gave Lie the designation "novelist of the sea." The success of the book brought the author, in 1874, by vote of the Storting, a life stipend known as a "poet's salary," which recognition put him in a class with Ibsen and Björnson. The great honor seems to have had a depressing effect, for Lie now scored four failures in succession. He was back in Norway, trying to portray social phenomena of the capital city. The reviewers were most irritating and offensive, and he felt obliged temporarily to desert the field. With the novel _Rutland_ (1881), he returned to the sea. This story surpasses _The Pilot_ in every respect. The sea is described with the fondness of a lover. Like _The Pilot_, it also deals with a problem of the home, but what chiefly impressed the public in reading the book was that the seamen, that important element of the Norwegian people, had found an adequate interpreter.

His next book, _Forward (Gaa Paa)_ (1882), was likewise a maritime novel, with panoramas in the life of the fisher folk on the western coast. At the same time it forecast the new age of industrial development, and revealed growing sympathy and increased understanding in matters of national import. The author seems to have become convinced that a novelist, too, might be able to lend a hand in paving the way for progress. In this book he had by his vivid portrayal attacked stagnation, superstition, sluggishness, and had proclaimed the new gospel of work, activity, enterprise. It had been begun during the latter part of a three years' sojourn in Germany. It was completed in Norway during the autumn of 1882, after which Lie took up his abode in Paris, where he made his home for many years.

For his next work, _A Life Prisoner_ (1883), Lie found his theme in the slums of Christiania. The treatment was not naturalistic enough to satisfy the critics. Lie was of course not unmindful of the new literary movement, but he possessed then, as always, sufficient individual momentum to carry him through the ephemeral phases of literary fads. His novels are not barometers of the prevailing literary atmosphere. He believed in a realism of true naturalism, which has stood the test of time. In this last work he brings a waif of modern society close to the hearts of his readers, and needs no explosions of pent-up indignation, no spirit of class hatred, to make his readers understand this unfortunate product of a bad environment. In his reply to the critics, Lie spoke forcibly on the new literary method, summing up his views in these words: "The main thing is to picture life so that the reader sees, hears, feels, comprehends it; by what esthetic means this is accomplished must be the author's own affair in each individual case. But experience has shown that of all methods direct ones are often the least effective. A single deft touch may save a dozen pages of detailed description." Lie was not a student of the base; he did not even have an artistic liking for evil. There are few bad characters in his works.

It was immediately after his controversy with the critics, in 1883, that _The Family at Gilje_ appeared--a superb illustration of Lie's realism of naturalness. An American critic has said of good realistic writing that it does not so much arouse the pleasure of surprise as that of recognition. To intelligent Norwegian readers of the day that was strikingly true of _The Family at Gilje_. To many readers it seemed like living their lives over again. This may not be a very severe test of the greatness of a novel. Greatness will depend upon other things--the breadth and depth of its humanity. Another point: "The right understanding of men and women leads to the right relations of men and women, and in this way a novel may do good" (F. Marion Crawford). Most of Lie's novels seem to have been written with this object in view. It is evident that in an attempt to portray life for this purpose, social and other questions are sure to appear--not thrust into the reader's face as a problem demanding that he take sides, but brought to his attention naturally, as such things ordinarily come in life. Discreetly done, as Lie surely could do it, this may be a most effective way of revolutionizing conscience. In this artistic manner Lie was, and no doubt consciously, a reformer. To be sure, this is not art for art's sake; it is something more human: art engaged in the pursuit of stimulating noble and healthful thought for the purpose of raising the average of human happiness.

It was this calm and restrained realistic method that Lie now applied in a series of novels which succeeded _The Family at Gilje_. As in this work, the scenes are usually laid in a preceding generation, preferably among the official class in the country. In these homes, which Lie knew so well, we feel that we are with real and natural people among whom problems are not discussed, but experienced. Yet these novels were not so conservative as they seemed. They had persuasive power in behalf of modern ideas with respect to such fundamental things as marriage, home, and children. There was even something of the essence of social dynamite in some of them. _The Family at Gilje_ gave the champions of women new arguments, but they could not approve of the author's advanced sympathies in _The Commodore's Daughters_, one of the realistic novels which now flowed from Lie's pen and which included: _A Maelstrom_ (1884), _The Commodore's Daughters_ (1885), _A Wedded Life_ (1887), _Maisa Jons_ (1888), and _Evil Powers_ (1890). Suddenly there came a change in his literary method, seemingly induced by some unpleasant experience with good friends. He had learned that the conduct of the best of men is often swayed by primal instinct rather than by disciplined reason. In this mood he reverted to the trusty Finn of his bosom who so long had lain dormant, and let him discourse on life and human nature. He proved voluble, resourceful, and original. The result was published in two volumes (1891 and 1892), entitled _Trold_. They are, in part, phantasmagorias charged with the symbolism of Norse legendary lore, where trolls are the personified manifestation of evil forces in nature. The opening sentence of the illuminating introduction says: "That there are trolls in human beings every one knows who has an eye for that sort of thing."

In the most characteristic of these stories, of which there are a dozen in each volume, Lie has personified primal instincts,--allegorized some of the strange facts and mystic forces of nature, man, and society. Others are in lighter vein and have a more human cast, being mere playful satires on social phenomena. They form a marvellous medley. At first it seems quite impossible to believe that the author of _The Family at Gilje_ can be the begetter of things so fantastic and grotesque. But when the reader thinks of the early Nordland stories, he understands, and then feels inclined to regret, that the Finn had so long lain dormant. One is tempted to believe that a little of the troll element could easily have been used to give a tinge of terror to his calm realism; and this is in fact what he has done most effectively in the novel _Dyre Rein_ (1896), which in other respects much resembles _The Family at Gilje_.

After the publication of _Trold_, Lie, even where he does not introduce troll effects, is not hesitant about using more tragic methods and more dramatic scenes than during the period of the strictly realistic novels. There is, moreover, a decided trend toward a wider scope and more cosmopolitan aims, as in _When the Iron Curtain Falls_ (1901), a bolder symbolism, as in _Niobe_ (1893) and in his last work, _East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and Beyond the Towers of Babylon_ (1905), in which, however, as the title indicates, the story is top-heavy with symbolism. It runs parallel with the main narrative as an introduction to each chapter. The whole is the tale of a genius, hampered and harassed by malicious trolls in human guise--evidently an adumbration of the author's own personal experience. But he is, as always, charitable: "Human nature is so complex!"

In other words: the last fifteen years of Lie's authorship reveal him in full possession of the realistic powers of the preceding period, illuminated by a profound comprehension of the mystic forces of life that so often determine human fates.

Like Ibsen, Lie lived abroad for many years, mainly in Paris, but usually spending his summers in the Bavarian Alps, where most of his writing was done. There were too many distractions in Paris, where his home was a centre of the colony of Scandinavian artists and literary workers. In the summer of 1893, after an absence of ten years, he felt the need of visiting Norway again. An intense feeling of homesickness had seized him, as the following incident will indicate. He had called on a Norwegian family in Paris who had just received a plant from Norway in Norwegian earth. "Thinking himself unobserved," one of his daughters tells, "I saw him turn from the company, take a pinch of that earth and put it to his mouth. Whether he kissed it or ate it I do not know. But he looked very solemn."

In Norway he was received most cordially. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Brandes proclaimed him "the most amiable of geniuses." He was interviewed, banqueted, and serenaded almost to distraction, and was glad to get back to Paris, happy, however, in having experienced the touching devotion of his countrymen. A decade of arduous toil followed, after which he began to make plans for returning to Norway to spend the last years of his life. A cozy home was built at Fredriksværn, on the southern coast, and in 1906 the family took possession of it. The next year, however, his faithful wife, the guardian of his genius, passed away. Dependent upon her companionship and solicitous care, he did not long survive her. He died July 5, 1908.

The Norwegian Storting took fitting cognizance of his death, and, as had been done at Ibsen's demise, decreed that interment should be made at the expense of the State.

"Blessed are the merciful," said the pastor at his bier.

"Be merciful!" is the sentiment that echoes and reëchoes throughout Jonas Lie's pages.

JULIUS E. OLSON

_The University of Wisconsin February, 1920_

[Footnote 1: Pronounced as Lee in English.]

[Footnote 2: Arne Garborg is one of Norway's greatest novelists. He is also a gifted lyric poet, and an exceedingly clever controversialist. Most of his works are written in _Landsmaal_, a composite of the peasant dialects. His biography of Lie is a classic.]

[Footnote 3: A peasant poet, kindred in spirit to both Burns and Heine.]

[Footnote 4: The composer of, among other notable things, the melody to Björnson's well-known national song. Before his death, at the age of twenty-four, he had given Edvard Grieg an electric spark from the dynamo of his Norse enthusiasm, which fired Grieg's imagination, and made him _par excellence_ the representative of Norse melody.]

THE FAMILY AT GILJE

THE FAMILY AT GILJE

_Chapter I_

It was a clear, cold afternoon in the mountain region. The air lay blue with the frost, with light rose tints over all the sharp crests, ravines, and peaks, which, like a series of gigantic drifts, tower above tower, floated up towards the horizon. Below, hills and wooded mountain slopes shut the region in with white walls, constantly narrower and narrower, nearer and nearer, always more contracting.

The snow was late this year, but in return, now that the Christmas season had come, lay so heavy on fir and spruce that it bent down both needles and twigs. The groves of birches stood up to their waists in snow; the small clusters of tile-roofed houses of the district were half buried, with snow-drifts pressing down over the roofs. The entrances to the farmyards were deeply dug paths, from which the gate and fence posts stuck up here and there like the masts of sunken boats.

The snow-plough had recently gone through the highway, and on the steep red-tiled roof of the captain's house men were busy shovelling down the great frozen snow-drifts, which hung threatening over the ends of the roof.

The captain's house was specially prominent in the district. It was unpainted and built of square logs, like the greater part of that kind of houses a generation ago.

Over the garden fence and almost up under the window-frames lay the snow-drifts with tracks of sleds and skis in their icy crust, which smoked a little in the frosty north wind under the sun.

It was the same cold, disagreeable north wind which, every time the outer door was opened, blew against the kitchen door until that opened too, and, if it was not closed again, soon after, one or another door on the next floor,--and that made the captain come down from his office, flushed and passionate, to make inquiries and fret and fume over the whole house as to who had gone there first and who had gone last. He could never understand why they did not keep the door shut, though the matter was most easily to be understood,--for the latch was old and loose, and the captain would never spend any money on the smith for a new one.

In the common room below, between the sofa and the stove, the captain's wife, in an old brown linsey-woolsey dress, sat sewing. She had a tall, stiff figure, and a strong, but gaunt, dried-up face, and had the appearance of being anxiously occupied at present by an intricate problem--the possibility of again being able to put a new durable patch on the seat of Jörgen's trousers; they were always bottomless--almost to desperation.

She had just seized the opportunity for this, while Jäger was up in his office, and the children were gone to the post-office; for she went about all day long like a horse grinding clay in a brickyard.

The mahogany sewing-table inlaid with mother-of-pearl and several different kinds of wood, which stood open before her, must have been a family heirloom; in its condition of faded antiquity, it reminded one not a little of her, and in any event did not at all correspond either with the high-backed, rickety, leather armchair, studded with brass nails, in which she sat, nor with the long birchen sofa covered with green linsey-woolsey, which stood like a solitary deserted land against the wall, and seemed to look longingly over to the brown, narrow folding-table, which, with its leaves let down, stood equally solitary and abandoned between the two windows.

The brown case with the four straight legs against the farther wall, with a heap of papers, books, hats, and the spy-glass upon it, was an old clavichord, which, with great trouble, she had had transported up into the mountain region, out of the effects of her home, and on which she had faithfully practised with her children the same pieces which she herself had learned.

The immense every-day room, with the bare timber walls, the unpainted sanded floor, and the small panes with short curtains fastened up in the middle, was in its whole extent extremely scantily furnished; it was half a mile from chair to chair, and everything had a rural meagreness such as one could often see in the homes of officials in the mountain districts in the forties. In the middle of the inner wall, before the great white fire-wall, the antique stove with the Naes iron-works stamp and the knotty wooden logs under it jutted out into the room like a mighty giant. Indeed, nothing less than such a mass of iron was needed to succeed in warming up the room; and in the woods of the captain's farm there was plenty of fuel.

Finally abandoning all more delicate expedients for the trousers, she had laid on a great patch covering everything, and was now sewing zealously. The afternoon sun was still shedding a pale yellow light in the window-frames; it was so still in the room that her movements in sewing were almost audible, and a spool of thread which fell down caused a kind of echo.

All at once she raised herself like a soldier at an order and gave attention. She heard her husband's quick, heavy step creaking on the stairs.

Was it the outside door again?

Captain Jäger, a red, round, and stout man in a threadbare uniform coat, came hastily in, puffing, with the still wet quill-pen in his mouth; he went straight to the window.

His wife merely sewed more rapidly; she wished to use the time, and also prudently to assume the defensive against what might come.

He breathed on the frosty pane in order to enlarge the part that could be seen through. "You will see there is something by the mail. The children are running a race down there in the road,--they are running away from Jörgen with the sled."

The needle only flew still faster.

"Ah, how they run!--Thinka and Thea. But Inger-Johanna! Come here, Ma, and see how she puts down her feet--isn't it as if she was dancing? Now she means to be the first in, and so she will be the first, that I promise you. It is no story when I tell you that the lass is handsome, Ma; that they all see. Ah, come and look how she gets ahead of Thinka! Just come now, Ma!"

But "Ma" did not stir. The needle moved with forced nervous haste. The captain's wife was sewing a race with what was coming; it was even possible that she might get the last of the patch finished before they entered, and just now the sun disappeared behind the mountain crest; they were short days it gave them up there.

The steps outside were taken in two or three leaps, and the door flew open.

Quite right--Inger-Johanna.

She rushed in with her cloak unfastened and covered with snow. She had untied the strings of her hood on the way up the steps, so that her black hair fell down in confusion over her hot face. Breathless, she threw her flowered Valders mittens on a chair. She stood a moment to get her breath, brushed her hair under her hood, and shouted out:

"An order for post-horses at the station, for Captain Rönnow and Lieutenant Mein. The horses are to be here at Gilje at six o'clock to-morrow morning. They are coming here."

"Rönnow, Ma!" roared the captain, surprised; it was one of the comrades of his youth.

Now the others also came storming in with the details.

The mother's pale face, with its marked features and smooth black hair in loops down over her cheeks in front of her cap, assumed a somewhat thoughtful, anxious expression. Should the veal roast be sacrificed which she had reserved for the dean, or the pig? The latter had been bought from the north district, and was fearfully poor.

"Well, well, I bet he is going to Stockholm," continued the captain, meditatively drumming on the window-frame. "Adjutant, perhaps; they would not let that fellow stay out there in the West. Do you know, Ma, I have thought of something of this sort ever since the prince had so much to do with him at the drill-ground. I often said to him, 'Your stories, Rönnow, will make your fortune,--but look out for the general, he knows a thing or two.' 'Pooh! that goes down like hot cakes,' said he. And it looks like it--the youngest captain!"

"The prince--" The captain's wife was just through with the trousers, and rose hastily. Her meagre, yellowish face, with its Roman nose, assumed a resolute expression: she decided on the fatted calf.

"Inger-Johanna, see to it that your father has his Sunday wig on," she exclaimed hurriedly, and hastened out into the kitchen.

The stove in the best room was soon packed full, and glowing. It had not been used since it had been rubbed up and polished with blacking last spring, and smoked now so that they were obliged to open door and windows to the cold, though it was below zero.

Great-Ola, the farm-hand, had been busy carrying large armfuls of long wood into the kitchen, and afterwards with brushing the captain's old uniform coat with snow out on the porch; it must not look as if he had dressed up.

The guest-chamber was made ready, with the beds turned down, and the fire started, so that the thin stove snapped, and the flies suddenly woke up and buzzed under the ceiling, while the wainscot was browned outside of the fire-wall and smelled of paint. Jörgen's hair was wet and combed; the girls changed their aprons to be ready to go down and greet the guests, and were set to work rolling up pipe-lighters for the card-table.

They kept looking out as long as the twilight lasted, both from the first and second story windows, while Great-Ola, with his red peaked cap, made a path in the snow to the carriage-road and the steps.

And now, when it was dark, the children listened with beating hearts for the slightest sound from the road. All their thoughts and longings went out towards the strange, distant world which so rarely visited them, but of which they heard so much that sounded grand and marvellous.

There are the bells!

But, no; Thinka was entirely wrong.

They had all agreed to that fact, when Inger-Johanna, who stood in the dark by a window which she held a little open, exclaimed, "But there they are!"

Quite right. They could hear the sleigh-bells, as the horse, moving by fits and starts, laboriously made his way up the Gilje hills.

The outside door was opened, and Great-Ola stood at the stairs, holding the stable lantern with a tallow candle in it, ready to receive them.

A little waiting, and the bells suddenly sounded plainly in the road behind the wood-shed. Now you could hear the snow creaking under the runners.

The captain placed the candlestick on the table in the hall, the floor of which had been freshly scoured, washed, and strewn with juniper. He went out on the stairs, while the children, head to head, peeped out of the kitchen door, and kept Pasop, who growled and fretted behind them, from rushing out and barking.

"Good-evening, Rönnow! Good-evening, Lieutenant! Welcome to Gilje!" said the captain with his strong, cheerful voice, while the vehicle, which at the last post-house was honored with the name of double sleigh, swung into the yard and up to the steps. "You are elegantly equipped, I see."

"Beastly cold, Peter,--beastly cold, Peter," came the answer from the tall figure wrapped in furs, as he threw down the reins, and, now a little stiff in his movements, stepped out of the sleigh, while the steaming horse shook himself in his harness so that the bells rang loudly. "I believe we are frozen stiff. And then this little rat we have for a horse would not go. It is a badger dog they have harnessed in order to dig our way through the snow-drifts. How are you, Peter? It will be pleasant to get into your house. How goes it?" he concluded, upon the steps, shaking the captain's hand. "Bring in the case of bottles, Lieutenant."

While the two gentlemen took off their furs and travelling-boots in the hall and paid for the horse, and Great-Ola carried the trunk up to the guest-chamber, an odor of incense diffused itself from the large room, which at once roused Captain Rönnow's cavalier instinct to a recollection of the lady, whom, in the joy of seeing his old comrade once more, he had forgotten. His large, stately figure stopped before the door, and he adjusted his stock.

"Do I look tolerably well, Peter, so I can properly appear before your wife?" he said, running his hand through his black curly hair.

"Yes, yes, fine enough--devilish fine-looking fellow, Lieutenant.--If you please, gentlemen. Captain Rönnow and Lieutenant Mein, Ma," he said, as he opened the door.

The mistress of the house rose from her place at the table, where she was now sitting with fine white knitting-work. She greeted Captain Rönnow as heartily as her stiff figure would allow, and the lieutenant somewhat critically. It was the governor's sister to whom the salaam was made, as Captain Rönnow afterwards expressed it--an old, great family.

She disappeared a little later into domestic affairs, to "get them something for supper."

Captain Rönnow rubbed his hands from the cold, wheeled around on one leg on the floor, and thus placed himself with his back to the stove. "I tell you we are frozen stiff, Peter,--but--Oh, Lieutenant, bring in the case of bottles."

When Lieutenant Mein came in again, Rönnow took a sealed bottle with a label, and held it, swinging by the neck, before the captain.

"Look at it, Peter Jäger! Look well at it!" and he moved over towards his friend. "Genuine arrack from Atschin in hither--farther--East--or West India. I present it to you. May it melt your heart, Peter Jäger!"

"Hot water and sugar, Ma!" shouted the captain out into the kitchen, "then we shall soon know whether you only mean to deceive us simple country folks with stories. And out with the whist-table till we have supper! We can play three-handed whist with a dummy."

"Brrr-rr-whew, what kind of stuff is it you've got in your tobacco box, Jäger?" said Captain Rönnow, who was filling his pipe at it; "powder, sneezing powder, I believe! Smell it, Lieutenant. It must be tansy from the nursery."

"Tideman's three crown, fellow! We can't endure your leaf tobacco and Virginia up here in the mountain districts," came from Jäger, who was pulling out and opening the card-table. "Only look at the next box under the lead cover, and you will find some cut-leaf tobacco, Bremen leaf, as black and high flavored as you want. Up here it is only to the goats that we can offer that kind, and to the folk who come from Bergen; they use strong tobacco there to dry out the wet fog."

The door opened, and the three girls and their little brother came in, carrying the tray with the glasses and the jug of hot water, which task they seemed to have apportioned among themselves according to the rules for the procession at the Duke of Marlborough's funeral, where, as is known, the fourth one carried nothing.

The tall, blond Kathinka marched at the head with the tray and glasses with the clinking teaspoons in them. She attempted the feat of curtseying, while she was carrying the tray, and blushed red when it was ready to slip, and the lieutenant was obliged to take hold of it to steady it.

He immediately noticed the next oldest, a brunette with long eyelashes, who was coming with the smoking water-jug on a plate, while the youngest, Thea, was immediately behind her with the sugar-bowl.

"But, my dear Peter Jäger," exclaimed Rönnow, astonished at the appearance of his friend's almost grown-up daughters, "when have you picked up all this? You wrote once about some girls,--and a boy who was to be baptized."

At the same moment Jörgen came boldly forward, strutting over the floor, and made his best bow, while he pulled his bristly yellow locks instead of his cap.

"What is your name?"

"Jörgen Winnecken von Zittow Jäger."

"That was heavy! You are a perfect mountain boy, are you not? Let me see you kick as high as your name."

"No, but as high as my cap," answered Jörgen, going back on the floor and turning a cart-wheel.

"Bold fellow, that Jörgen!" And with that, as Jörgen had done his part, he stepped back into obscurity. But while the gentlemen were pouring out the arrack punch at the folding-table, he kept his eyes uninterruptedly fastened on Lieutenant Mein. It was the lieutenant's regularly trimmed black moustache, which seemed to him like bits that he had not got into his mouth properly.

"Oh, here, my girl!" said Rönnow, turning to one of the daughters, who stood by his side while he was putting some sugar into the steaming glass, "what is your name?"

"Inger-Johanna."

"Yes, listen"--he spoke without seeing anything else than the arm he touched to call her attention. "Listen, my little Inger-Johanna! In the breast pocket of my fur coat out in the hall there are two lemons--I didn't believe that fruit grew up here in the mountains, Peter!--two lemons."

"No, let me! Pardon me!" and the lieutenant flew gallantly.

Captain Rönnow looked up, astonished. The dark, thin girl, in the outgrown dress which hung about her legs, and the three thick, heavy, black cables, braided closely for the occasion, hanging down her back, stood distinct in the light before him. Her neck rose, delicately shaped and dazzlingly fresh, from the blue, slightly low-cut, linsey-woolsey dress, and carried her head proudly, with a sort of swan-like curve.

The captain grasped at once why the lieutenant was so alert.

"Bombs and grenades, Peter!" he exclaimed.

"Do you hear that, Ma?" the captain grunted slyly.

"Up here among the peasants the children--more's the pity--grow up without any other manners than those that they learn of the servants," sighed the mother. "Don't stand so bent over, Thinka, straighten up."

Thinka straightened up her overgrown blond figure and tried to smile. She had the difficult task of hiding a plaster on one side of her chin, where a day or two before she had fallen down through the cellar trap-door in the kitchen.

Soon the three gentlemen sat comfortably at their cards, each one smoking his pipe and with a glass of hot arrack punch by his side. Two moulded tallow candles in tall brass candlesticks stood on the card-table and two on the folding-table; they illuminated just enough so that you could see the almanac, which hung down by a piece of twine from a nail under the looking-glass, and a part of the lady's tall form and countenance, while she sat knitting in her frilled cap. In the darkness of the room the chairs farthest off by the stove could hardly be distinguished from the kitchen door--from which now and then came the hissing of the roasting meat.

"Three tricks, as true as I live--three tricks, and by those cards!" exclaimed Captain Rönnow, eager in the game.

"Thanks, thanks," turning to Inger-Johanna who brought a lighted paper-lighter to his expiring pipe. "Th-a-nks"--he continued, drawing in the smoke and puffing it out, his observant eyes again being attracted by her. Her expression was so bright, the great dark eyes moving to and fro under her eyebrows like dark drops, while she stood following the cards.

"What is your name, once more, my girl?" he asked absently.

"Inger-Johanna," she replied with a certain humor; she avoided looking at him.

"Yes, yes.--Now it is my turn to deal! Your daughter puts a bee in my bonnet, madam. I should like to take her with me to Christiania to the governor's, and bring her out. We would make a tremendous sensation, that I am sure of."

"At last properly dealt! Play."

With her hands on the back of her father's chair, Inger-Johanna gazed intently on the cards; but her face had a heightened glow.

Rönnow glanced at her from one side. "A sight for the gods, a sight for the gods!" he exclaimed, as he gathered together with his right hand the cards he had just arranged, and threw them on the table. "Naturally I mean how the lieutenant manages dummy--you understand, madam," nodding to her with significance. "Heavens! Peter, that was a card to play.--Here you can see what I mean," he continued. "Trump, trump, trump, trump!" He eagerly threw four good spades on the table, one after another, without paying any attention to what followed.

The expression of the lady's face, as she sat there and heard her innermost thoughts repeated so plainly, was immovably sealed; she said, somewhat indifferently, "It is high time, children, you said good-night; it is past your bed-time. Say good-night to the gentlemen."

The command brought disappointment to their faces; not obeying was out of the question, and they went round the table, and made curtsies and shook hands with the captain and the lieutenant.

The last thing Jörgen noticed was that the lieutenant turned round, stretched his neck, and gaped like Svarten as they went out.

Their mother straightened up over her knitting-work. "You used to visit my brother's, the governor's, formerly, Captain Rönnow," she ventured. "They are childless folk, who keep a hospitable house. You will call on them now, I suppose."

"Certainly I shall! To refrain from doing that would be a crime! You have, I should imagine, thought of sending one of your daughters there. The governor's wife is a person who knows how to introduce a young lady into the world, and your Inger-Johanna--"

The captain's wife answered slowly and with some stress; something of a suppressed bitterness rose up in her. "That would be an entirely unexpected piece of good fortune; but more than we out-of-the-way country folk can expect of our grand, distinguished sister-in-law. Small circumstances make small folk, more's the pity; large ones ought to make them otherwise.--My brother has made her a happy wife."

"Done. Will you allow an old friend to work a little for your attractive little Inger?" returned Captain Rönnow.

"I think that Ma will thank you. What do you say, Gitta? Then you will have a peg to hang one of them on. It can't be from one of us two that Inger-Johanna has inherited her beauty, Ma!" said Captain Jäger, coughing and warding off his wife's admonitory look; "but there is blood, both on her father's and mother's side. Her great-grandmother was married off up in Norway by the Danish queen because she was too handsome to be at court--it was your grandmother, Ma! Fröken von--"

"My dear Jäger," begged his wife.

"Pshaw, Ma! The sand of many years has been strewed over that event."

When the game was again started, the captain's wife went with her knitting-work to the card-table, snuffed first one candle and then the other, leaned over her husband, and whispered something.

The captain looked up, rather surprised. "Yes, indeed, Ma! Yes, indeed--'My camel for your dromedary,' said Peter Vangensten, when he swapped his old spavined horse for Mamen's blooded foal. If you come with your arrack from Holland and farther India, then I put my red wine direct from France against it--genuine Bordeaux, brought home and drawn straight from the hogshead! There were just two dozen the governor sent us with the wagon the autumn Jörgen was baptized.--The two farthest to the left, Ma! You had better take Marit with you with the lantern. Then you can tell the governor's wife that we drank her health up here among the snow-drifts, Rönnow."

"Yes, she is very susceptible to that kind of thing, Peter Jäger."

When the captain's wife came in again, she had the stiff damask tablecloth on her arm, and was accompanied by a girl who helped move the folding-table out on the floor. It was to be set for supper, and the card-table must be moved into the best room, across the hall, which was now warm.

"Can you wait, Ma, till the rubber is played?"

Ma did not answer; but they felt the full pressure of her silence; her honor was at stake--the roast veal.

And they played on silently, but at a tearing pace as with full steam.

Finally the captain exclaimed, while Ma stood immovable with the cloth in the middle of the floor, "There, there, we must get away, Rönnow!"

In the chamber above, impatient hearts were hammering and beating.

While Jörgen went to sleep with the image before him of his lieutenant who gaped like Svarten when he came out of the stable door into the light, and after Torbjörg had put out the candle, the sisters stole out into the great, cold, dark hall. There they all three stood, leaning over the balustrade, and gazing down on the fur coats and mufflers, which hung on the timber wall, and on the whip and the two sabre sheaths and the case of bottles, which were dimly lighted by the stable lantern on the hall table.

They smelt the odor of the roast as it came up, warm and appetizing, and saw when the guests, each with his punch-glass in his hand and with flickering candle, went across the hall into the large room. They heard the folding-table moved out and set, and later caught the sound of the clinking of glasses, laughter, and loud voices.

Every sound from below was given a meaning, every fragment of speech was converted into a romance for their thirsty fancy.

They stood there in the cold till their teeth chattered and their limbs shook against the wood-work, so that they were obliged to get into bed again to thaw out.

They heard how the chairs made a noise when the guests rose from the table, and they went out in the hall again, Thinka and Inger-Johanna,--Thea was asleep. It helped a little when they put their feet upon the lowest rail of the balustrade, or hung over it with their legs bent double under them.

Thinka held out because Inger-Johanna held out; but finally she was compelled to give up, she could not feel her legs any more. And now Inger-Johanna alone hung down over the balustrade.

A sort of close odor of punch and tobacco smoke frozen together rose up through the stairs in the cold, and every time the door was opened and showed the heavy, smoky, blue gleam of light in the great room, she could hear officers' names, fragments of laughter, of violent positive assertions, with profane imprecations by all possible and impossible powers of the heavens above and the earth beneath, and between them her father's gay voice,--all chopped off in mince-meat every time the door was shut.

When Inger-Johanna went to bed again, she lay thinking how Captain Rönnow had asked her twice what her name was, and then again how at the card-table he had said, "I should like to take her with me to the governor's wife; we would make a tremendous sensation." And then what came next, "Naturally I mean how the lieutenant plays dummy,"--which they thought she did not understand.

The wind blew and howled around the corner of the house, and whistled down through the great plastered chimney-pipe in the hall--and she still, half in her dreams, heard Captain Rönnow's "Trump! trump! trump! trump!"

The next day Ma went about the house as usual with her bunch of keys; she had hardly slept at all that night.

She had become old before her time, like so many other "mas," in the household affairs of that period--old by bearing petty annoyances, by toil and trouble, by never having money enough, by bending and bowing, by continually looking like nothing and being everything--the one on whom the whole anxious care of the house weighed.

But--"One lives for the children."

That was Ma's pet sigh of consolation. And the new time had not yet come to the "mas" with the question whether they were not also bound to realize their own personal lives.

But for the children it was a holiday, and immediately after breakfast they darted into the great room.

There stood the card-table, again moved against the wall, with the cards thrown in a disorderly pile over the paper on which the score had been kept. It had been folded up and burned on one end for a lighter; and by its side, during a preliminary cleaning, the three pipes were lying, shoved aside. One window was still open, notwithstanding the wind blew in so that the fastening hook rattled.

There was something in the room--a pungent odor, which was not good; no, but there was, nevertheless, something about it--something of an actual occurrence.

Outside of the window Great-Ola stood with his hands on the shovel in the steep snow-drift, listening to Marit's account of how the captain had left a broad two-kroner piece for drink money on the table up in the guest-chamber and the lieutenant a shilling under the candlestick, and how the mistress had divided them among the girls.

"The lieutenant was not so butter-fingered," suggested Marit.

"Don't you know that a lieutenant would be shot if he gave as much as his captain, girl," retorted Great-Ola, while she hurried in with the keys of the storehouse and the meal-chest.

From the captain's sleeping-room the sound of his snoring could be heard for the whole forenoon. The guests did not go to bed, and started at six o'clock in the morning, when the post-boy came to the door--after the second bottle, also, of Rönnow's Indian arrack had been emptied, and a breakfast with whiskey, brawn, and the remnants of the roast veal had strengthened them for the day's journey.

But the thing to be done was to have a good time on the holiday. The sisters bustled about in the hall with their skis, and Jörgen was trying how the outer steps would do for a ski slide.

Soon they were out on the long steep hill behind the cow-barn--the ski-staff in both hands in front for a balance, their comforters streaming out behind their necks. In the jump Inger-Johanna lost her balance and almost--no, she kept up!

It was because she looked up to the window of the sleeping-room to see if her father appreciated her skill.

He was walking about and dressing. Ma had at last, about dinner time, ventured to wake him up.

_Chapter II_

Two days before Christmas Great-Ola with Svarten and his load was expected from Christiania, where he went twice a year, St. John's Day and Christmas, for the household supplies. To-day was the ninth day; but in sleighing like this, when the horse's feet struck through at every step, no one could be sure of anything.

The load, met on the run, far down the slippery, slushy hill, by the children and the barking, one-eyed Pasop, came along in the afternoon, while Svarten, even in his exertions on the steep part of the hill, neighed and whinnied with pleasure at being home again and longing to get into the stall by the side of Brunen. He had had quite enough of the journey, and worked himself into a foam in the harness to get over the Gilje hill.

Marit, the cook, and Torbjörg were out in the porch before the kitchen; the three girls and Jörgen stood wholly absorbed by the load and the horse, and the captain himself came down the stairs.

"Well, Great-Ola, how has Svarten pulled through? Sweaty and tired, I see! Did you get my uniform buttons? Ah, well! I hope you did not forget the tobacco!--And my watch, could they do anything with that?--Have you the bill?--Well, then, you must put up Svarten--he shall have an extra feed of oats to-day. What? What have you got there?"

Besides the bill, Great-Ola had taken out of his inside vest pocket a letter wrapped up in paper, blue postal paper, with a beautiful red seal on it. The captain looked at it a moment with surprise. It was the writing of the governor's wife and her seal in the wax, and without saying a word he hastened in to his wife.

The load from the city, the great event of the half year, occupied the attention of the whole household. Its contents interested all, not the children alone, and when Great-Ola, later in the evening, sat in the kitchen, where he was treated as a guest on account of his return home, and told about his trip to the city and about Svarten and himself, what miracles they had wrought on such and such hills--and the load weighed this time at least two hundred pounds more than the last--then there was a sort of glamor about him and Svarten, too.

One evening he had even found his way in a snowstorm, and once the salt-bag was forgotten, and then Svarten actually would not stir from the inn-yard, but lashed his tail at every cut of the whip, and kept looking back, until the boy came running out of the hall and shouted out about the bag, then off he started willingly enough.

The captain had gone in and had wandered up and down in the room for a while with the letter of the governor's wife in blue postal paper in his hand. He looked very much offended at Ma, when she seemed to think more about the load from the city than about his letter. She only suggested gently that they must talk about all that in the evening.

"All that--you say, Ma!--that Inger-Johanna is invited down there next winter--and we have Rönnow to thank for it. That is short and clear enough, I should think! What? What?" he roared out impatiently. "Is it not plain?--or have you some notions about it?"

"No--no, dear Jäger!"

"Well, then you should not delay the whole unloading of the goods with your quiet sigh, full of importance, and your secret meanings which always make me mad. You know I hate it! I go straight to the point always!"

"I was merely thinking about your uniform coat, whether the tailor has sent the pieces with it, you know--"

"You are right, you are right, Gitta," and out he rushed like a flash.

The unpacking went on in the kitchen, before the spice closet with its numerous compartments, where raisins, prunes, almonds, the different kinds of sugar, allspice, and cinnamon, were each put into their own places. Now and then fell a tribute, a prune, two almonds, three raisins, to each of the children; and it could not be denied that this load from the city was like a foretaste of Christmas Eve.

At first the captain was intensely interested in getting hold of the ink bottles, the tobacco, and the strong wares which were to be kept in the cellar--everything else must be put aside for them. And then he flew in and out, with one bill or another in his hand and a quill pen full of ink, to compare with the general bill which his wife had nailed up on the upper door of the spice closet.

"Ma, can you conceive such extortion?" stopping suddenly before the bill, which still finally was always found to be right, and then turning thoughtfully round again, while he dried his pen in his chocolate-colored every-day wig.

His plethoric, vociferous, somewhat confused nature always became furious when he saw a bill; it operated like a red cloth on a bull, and when, as now, all the half year's bills came storming down on him at once, he both roared and bellowed. It was an old story for his wife, who had acquired a remarkable skill in taking the bull by the horns.

The wrongs, which thus he did _not_ suffer, seemed nevertheless to awaken an increasing storm of resentment in him. With a violent tug at the door-latch, and his wig awry, he would come suddenly in, exclaiming,--"Seventy-five dollars, three shillings, seventeen pence!--seventy-five--dollars--three shillings--and seventeen pence!--it is almost enough to make one crazy. And so you ordered citron--citron,"--he put on a falsetto tone, and laughed out of pure rage. "He, he, he, he!--now have we the means for that? And then, almond soap for the guest-chamber!" This last came in a deep, suppressed, gloomy bass. "I cannot understand how you could have hit on that!"

"My dear, that was thrown in. Don't you see that it isn't carried out for anything?"

"Thrown in--oh, thrown in--yes, there you see how they cheat! Seventy-five dollars, three shillings, and seventeen pence--plainly that is enough to be frightened at. Where shall I find the money?"

"But you have already found it, Jäger!--Remember the servants," she whispered quickly. It was a quiet prayer to put off the rest of the outburst till later in the afternoon, between themselves.

The captain's various ecstatic flashes of passion about the bills went over the house that afternoon like a refreshing and purifying thunderstorm before Christmas. The children, cowed and tortured, took refuge during the storm under the protection of their mother, who warded off the blast; but when his step was again heard in the office, they went on, just as persevering and inquisitive as before, peeping into and shaking out the bags in order to find a raisin or two or a currant that had been forgotten, collecting the twine, looking after the weight, and cutting up the bar soap.

During all these anxieties the tall form of the mistress stood in uninterrupted activity, bowed like a crane over the box with the city wares, which had been lifted in on the kitchen floor. Jars, willow baskets filled with hay, small bags, and an infinity of packages in gray wrappers, tied up with twine, small and great, vanished by degrees into their different resting-places, even to the last, the bag with the fine wheat flour, which was brought in by Great-Ola and put by itself in the meal-chest in the pantry.

When the spice closet was finally shut, the captain stood there for the twentieth time. With the air of a man who had been made to wait and been tormented long enough, he gently tapped her on the shoulder with his fingers and said, rather reproachfully, "It really astonishes me, Gitta, that you don't pay more attention to the letter we have received to-day."

"I haven't been able to think of anything else than your troubles with the bills, Jäger. Now I think you might taste the French brandy this evening, to see if it is good enough for the Christmas punch. Cognac is so dear."

"That's a good idea, Gitta!--Yes, yes--only let us have supper soon."

The plates with oatmeal porridge and the blue milk in the cold cups were placed upon the table; they stood like black, dreary islands over the cloth, and presented no temptation to linger over the evening meal.

After the necessary part of it was swallowed and the children were sent upstairs, the captain sat, now quite cozy and comfortable, before the table, which was still extended, with his tobacco and his taste of toddy made of the French brandy, whose transformation into Christmas punch was going on in the kitchen, from which there was also heard the sizzling of the waffle-iron.

"Only strong, Ma,--only strong!--Then you can manage with the brown sugar.--Yes, yes," tasting of the wooden dipper which his wife brought in, "you can treat the sheriff to that with pleasure."

"Now Marit is coming in with the warm waffles,--and then it was this about the letter of the governor's wife.--You see, Jäger, we cannot send the child there unless we have her suitably fitted out; she must have a black silk confirmation dress, city boots and shoes, a hat, and other things."

"Black silk conf--"

"Yes, and some other dresses, which we must order in Christiania; there is no help for it."

Captain Jäger began to walk to and fro.

"So, so!--So, so! Well, if that is your idea, then I think we will decline the invitation with thanks."

"I knew that, Jäger! You would like to have the yolk, but as to breaking the egg, you hesitate."

"Break the egg? Break my purse, you mean."

"I mean, you can call in a part of the six hundred dollars you got with me. I have thought and reckoned it over. Inger-Johanna alone will cost us over one hundred dollars this year, and when Thinka is going to Ryfylke, we shall not get off with two hundred."

"Over two hundred dollars!--Are you crazy? Are you crazy--really crazy, Ma? I think you have a screw loose!" He made a sudden turn over the floor. "The letter shall rather go at once into the stove."

"Very well; you know that I think everything you do is sensible, Jäger."

He stopped, with the letter in his hand and his mouth half open.

"And the slight chance Inger-Johanna might have of being provided for, that perhaps is not so much to be taken into account. She is certainly the nearest relation. There is nothing in the way to prevent her being the heir also.--N-no, do as you will and as you like, Jäger. You probably see more clearly in this than I do.--And then you will take the responsibility yourself, Jäger,"--she sighed.

The captain crumpled the letter together, gave her a hasty glance like a wounded lion, and then stood awhile and stared at the floor. Suddenly he threw the letter on the table and broke out: "She must go!--But the cost of the campaign--the cost of the campaign, Ma, that, I learned in my strategy, must be borne by the enemy! And the governor's wife must naturally take care of her outfit there."

"The governor's wife, Jäger, must not pay for anything--not a bit--before she has decided if she will keep her. We must not be anxious to be rid of her; but _she_ shall be anxious to get her; and she must ask us for her, both once and twice, you understand."

That the winter was coming on was less noticed this year than usual. Two children were to be fitted out. Soon spinning-wheel and reel accompanied, in the short day and long evening, the murmur of the stove. Ma herself spun all the fine woof for the linsey-woolsey dresses. There was knitting, weaving, and sewing, nay, also embroidery on linen--"twelve of everything for each one." And in school hours in the office the captain worked not less zealously with the French grammar.

The stiffening cold frost, which blew about the house and cut like ice from every crack; the cold so fierce that the skin was torn off the hands when any one was unlucky enough to take hold of the latch of the outer door or of the porch without mittens; complaints of nail ache, when the children came in from out-of-doors; or else that the drinking-water was frozen solid in the tubs and pails, that the meat must be thawed out,--this was only what was usual in the mountain region. The doleful, monotonous howling and the long, hungry yelling of the wolves down on the ice could be heard from the Gilje hills both by day and by night. The road on the lake lasted a long time. It was there till long into the spring thaw, though worn, unsafe, and blue with its dirt-brown mudstreak.

But when it did disappear, and the ice was melted by the heat of the sun, there lay on the steep hill behind the house a long line of bleaching linen, so shining white that it seemed as if the snow had forgotten to go away there.

_Chapter III_

It was midsummer. The mountain region was hazy in the heat; all the distance was as if enveloped in smoke. The girls on the farm went about barefooted, in waists and short petticoats. It was a scorching heat, so that the pitch ran in sticky white lines down from the fat knots in the timber of the newly built pigsty, where Marit was giving swill to the hogs. Some sand-scoured wooden milk-pans stood on edge by the well, drying, while one or two sparrows and wagtails hopped about or perched nodding on the well-curb, and the blows of the axe resounded from the wood-shed in the quiet of the afternoon. Pasop lay panting in the shade behind the outer door, which stood open.

The captain had finished his afternoon nap, and stood by the field looking at Great-Ola and the horses ploughing up an old grassland which was to be laid down again.

The bumble-bee was humming in the garden. With about the same monotonous voice, Thinka and Inger-Johanna, sitting by the stone table in the summer-house over the cracked blue book-cover and the dog-eared, well-thumbed leaves, mumbled the Catechism and Commentary, with elbows and heads close to each other. They had to learn pages eighty-four to eighty-seven before supper time, and they held their fingers in their ears so as not to disturb each other.

There was darkness like a shadow just outside of the garden fence. But they saw nothing, heard nothing; the long passage of Scripture went way over on the second page.

Then there was a gay clearing of a throat. "Might one interrupt the two young ladies with earthly affairs?"

They both looked up at the same time. The light hop leaves about the summer-house had not yet entirely covered the trellis.

With his arms leaning on the garden fence there stood a young man--he might have been standing there a long time--with a cap almost without a visor over thick brown hair. His face was sunburned and swollen.

The eyes, which gazed on them, looked dreadfully wicked.

Neither of them saw more; for, by a common impulse at the phenomenon, they ran in utter panic out of the door, leaving the books spread open behind them, and up the steps in to Ma, who was in the kitchen buttering bread for lunch.

"There was a man standing--there was a man out by the garden fence. It was certainly not any one who goes around begging or anything like that."

"Hear what he has to say, Jörgen," said Ma, quickly comprehending the situation; "this way, out the veranda door. Appear as if you came of your own accord."

Both the girls flew in to the windows of the best room in order to peep out under the curtains.

He was coming in by the steps to the outer door with Jörgen, who suddenly vanished from his sight into the kitchen.

Little Thea stood in the door of the sitting-room with a piece of bread and butter, clutching the latch, and, holding the door half shut and half open, stared at him; she was altogether out of it.

"Is your father at home?"

"Yes, but you must go by the kitchen path, do you hear? And wait till we have had lunch; he is not going up to the office before that." She took him for a man who was going to be put on the roll.

"But I am not going to the office, you see."

Ma herself came now; she had managed to get her cap on in her hurry, but it was all awry.

"A young man, I see, who has perhaps come a long distance to-day. Please walk in."

Her smile was kind, but her eye underneath it was as sharp as an officer's review; here were holes and darns with coarse thread for the nonce and rents in abundance, and it was not easy to free herself from the suspicion of some questionable rover, especially when he dropped straight in through the door with the remark: "I come like a tramp from the mountain wilds, madam. I must make many excuses."

Ma's searching look had in the mean time broken through the shell. The white streak on the upper part of the forehead, under the shade where the skin had not been reddened by the sunburn, and his whole manner determined her to scrutinize him prudently. "Please sit down, Jäger is coming soon." She incidentally passed by the sewing-table and shut it. "Won't you let me send you a glass of milk in the mean time?"

A girl came in with a great basin, shaped like a bowl, and vanished again.

He put it to his mouth, noted with his eye how much he had drunk, drank again, and took another view.

"It is delightful--is not at all like the mistress of the house, for she seemed like sour milk, and"--he suppressed a sigh--"dangerously dignified."

He drank again.

"Yes, now one really must stop; but since and whereas--"

He placed the basin quite empty on the plate.

"Best to attack him at once. Dead broke, will you on my honest face lend me four--no, that does not sound well, better out with it at once--five dollars, so that I can get to Christiania?"

The small eyes twinkled quickly. If only the captain had come then! Some one was walking about out there.

He gazed abstractedly; he repeated his speech to himself. It was always altered, and now he stood again at the ticklish point--the amount. He considered if perhaps he only needed to ask for four--three?

There was a growling out in the hall; the dog rushed out, barking loudly. It was plainly the captain.

The young man rose hurriedly, but sat down again like a spring ready to jump up out of a chair: he had been in too great haste.

"In the parlor--some sort of fellow who wants to talk with me?" It was out on the stairs that some one was speaking.

A moment or two later, and the captain appeared in the door.

"I must beg you to excuse me, Captain. I have unfortunately, unfortunately"--here he began to stammer; bad luck would have it that one of the two young girls whom he had seen in the summer-house, the dark one, came in after her father; and so it would not do--"come over the mountain," he continued. "You will understand that one cannot exactly appear in the best plight." The last came in a tone of forced ease.

The captain at that moment did not appear exactly agreeably surprised.

"My name is Arent Grip!"

"Arent Grip!" rejoined the captain, looking at him. "Grip! the same phiz and eyes! You can never be the son of Perpetuum--cadet at Lurleiken? He is a farmer, or proprietor I suppose he calls himself, somewhere among the fjords."

"He is my father, Captain."

"Does he still work as hard as ever at his mechanical ideas?" asked the captain. "I heard that he had carried the water for his mill straight through the roof of the cow-barn, so that the cows got a shower bath, when the pipes sprung a leak."

Inger-Johanna caught a movement of indignation, as if the stranger suddenly grasped after his cap. "Shame, shame, that those times did not give a man like my father a scientific education." He said this with a seriousness utterly oblivious of the captain.

"So, so. Well, my boy, you must be kind enough to take a little lunch with us, before you start off. Inger-Johanna, tell Ma that we want something to drink and bread and butter. You must be hungry coming down from the mountains. Sit down.--And what is now your--your occupation or profession in the world? if I might ask." The captain sauntered around the floor.

"Student; and, Captain," he gasped, in order to use quickly the moment while they were alone, "since I have been so free as to come in here thus without knowing you--"

"Student!" The captain stopped in the middle of the floor. "Yes, I would have risked my head on it, saw it at the first glance, but yet I was a little in doubt. Well, yes," clearing his throat, "nearly plucked, perhaps; eh, boy?" inquired he good-naturedly. "Your father also had trouble with his examinations."

"I have not the fractional part of my father's brains, but with what I have, they gave me this year _laudabilis praeceteris_."

"Son of my friend, Fin Arentzen Grip!" He uttered each one of the names with a certain tender recognition. "Your father was, all things considered, a man of good ability, not to say a little of a genius,--when he failed in his officer's examination, it was all due to his irregular notions. Well, so you are his son! Yes, he wrote many a composition for me--the pinch was always with the compositions, you see."

"And, Captain," began the young man again earnestly, now in a louder and more decided tone, "since I can thus, without further ceremony, confidently address you--"

"You can tell Ma," said the captain, when Inger-Johanna again came in with her taller, overgrown sister, "that it is Student Arent Grip, son of my old delightful comrade at the Military School."

The result of this last message was that the contemplated plate with a glass and bread and butter was changed to a little lunch for him and the captain, spread out on a tray.

The old bread-basket of red lacquer was filled with slices of black, sour bread, the crusts of which were cracked off. More's the pity, Ma declared, it had been spoiled in the baking, and the gray, heavy crust was due to the fact that so much of the grain on the captain's farm last year was harvested before it was ripe.

The student showed the sincerity of his forbearance of these defects through an absolutely murderous appetite. The prudential lumps of salt, which studded the fresh mountain butter with pearly tears in a superfluous abundance, he had a knack of dodging boldly and incisively, which did not escape admiring eyes; only a single short stroke of his knife on the under side of the bread and butter, and the lumps of salt rained and pattered over the plate.

"You will surely have some dried beef? I guess you have not had much to eat to-day. Go and get some more, Thinka. A little dram with the cheese, what? You can believe that we tested many a good old cheese in the den at your father's, and when we had a spree, we sent for it, and it circulated round from one party to another; and then the apples from Bergen which he got by the bushel by freighting-vessel from home! He was such a greenhorn, and so kind hearted--too confiding for such rascals as we! Oh, how we hunted through his closet and boxes!--and then we did our exercises at the same time; it was only his that the teacher corrected through the whole class." The captain emptied the second part of his long dram. "Ah!" He held his glass up against the light, and looked through it, as he was accustomed to. "But nevertheless, there was something odd about him, you know; you must see that such a one, straight from the country, does not fit in at once. Never forget when he first lectured us about perpetual motion. It was done with only five apples in a wheel, he said, and the apples must be absolutely mathematically exact. It was that which got out and ruined him, so people came to--yes, you know--comment on it, and make fun of him; and that hung on till the examination."

The student wriggled about.

The young ladies, who were sitting with their sewing by the window, also noticed how he had now forgotten himself; during the whole time he had kept one boot under the chair behind the other in order to conceal the sole of his shoes gaping wide open. They were in good spirits, and hardly dared to look at each other--son of a man who was called Perpetuum, was a cadet, and gave the cows a bath. Father was dreadfully amusing when there were strangers present.

"Not a moment's doubt that there were ideas--but there was something obstinate about him. To come, as he did, straight from the farm, and then to begin to dispute with the teacher about what is in the book, never succeeds well, especially in physics in the Military School. And you can believe that was a comedy."

"Then I will bet my head that it was not my father who was wrong, Captain."

"Hm, hm--naturally yes, his father to a dot," he mumbled--"Hm, well, you have got _praeceteris_ all the same,--will you have a drop more?" came the hospitable diversion.

"No, I thank you. But I will tell you how it was with my father. It was just as it was with a hound they had once at the judge's. There was such blood and spirit in him that you would search long to find his equal; but one day he bit a sheep, and so he had to be cured. It was done by locking him up in a sheepfold. There he stood, alone before the ram and all the sheepfold. It seemed to him splendid fun. Then the ram came leaping at him, and the dog rolled heels over head. Pshaw, that was nothing; but after the ram came tripping--before he could rise--all the fifty sheep trip--trip--trip, over him; then he was entirely confused. Again they stood opposite each other, and once more the ram rushed in on the dog, and trip--trip--trip--trip, came the feet of the whole flock of sheep over him. So they kept on for fully two hours, until the dog lay perfectly quiet and completely stunned. He was cured, never bit a sheep again. But what he was good for afterwards we had better not talk about--he had been through the Military School, Captain."

When he looked up, he met the dark, intense eyes of the mistress fixed on him; her capped head immediately bent down over the sewing again.

The captain had listened more and more eagerly. The cure of the hound interested him. It was only at the last expression he discovered that there was any hidden meaning in it.

"Hm--my dear Grip. Ah! Yes, you think that. Hm, can't agree with you. There were skilful teachers, and--ho, ho,--really we were not sheep--rather wolves to meet with, my boy. But the cure, I must admit, was disgraceful for a good dog, and in so far--well, a drop more?"

"Thank you, Captain."

"But what kind of a road do you say you have been over, my boy?"

With the food and the glass and a half of cordial which he had enjoyed, new life had come into the young man. He looked at his clothes, and was even so bold as to put his boots out; a great seam went across one knee.

"I certainly might be set up as a scarecrow for a terror and warning to all those who will depart from the highway. It was all because at the post station I met a deer-hunter, an excellent fellow. The chap talked to me so long of what there was on the mountain that I wanted to go with him."

"Extremely reasonable," muttered the captain, "when a man is paying for his son in Christiania."

"I had become curious, I must tell you, and so started off for the heart of the mountains."

"Is he not even more aggravatingly mad than his father,--to start in haphazard over the black, pathless mountain?"

"The track led over the débris and stones at the foot at first for five hours. But I don't know what it is upon the mountain; it was as if something got into my legs. The air was so fine and light, as if I had been drinking champagne; it intoxicated me. I should have liked to walk on my hands, and it would have been of no consequence to any one in the whole wide world, for I was on the summit. And never in my life have I seen such a view as when we stood, in the afternoon, on the mountain crest,--only cool, white, shining snow, and dark blue sky, peak on peak, one behind the other, in a glory as far as the eye could reach."

"Yes, we have snow enough, my boy. It stands close up against the walls of the house here all winter, as clear, white, and cold as any one could wish. We find ourselves very well satisfied with that,--but show me a beautiful green meadow or a fine field of grain, my boy."

"It seemed to me as if one great fellow of a mountain stood by the side of another and said: You poor, thin-legged, puny being, are you not going to be blown away in the blue draught, here on the snow-field, like a scrap of paper? If you wish to know what is great, take your standard from us."

"You got _praeceteris_, you said, my man? Yes, yes, yes, yes! What do you say if we get the shoemaker to put a little patch on your shoes to-night?"

It was as much as an invitation to stay all night!--Extremely tempting to postpone the request till next day. "Thank you, Captain, I will not deny that it might be decidedly practical."

"Tell the shoemaker, Jörgen, to take them as soon as he has put the heel-irons on those I am to have for the survey of the roads."

Oh! So he is going away, perhaps early to-morrow morning; it must be done this evening, nevertheless! Now, when the daughters were beginning to clear off the table, it was best to watch his chance.

The captain began walking up and down the floor with short steps. "Yes, yes, true! Yes, yes, true! Would you like to see some fine pigs, Grip?"

The student immediately sprang up. The way out! He grabbed his cap. "Do you keep many, Captain?" he asked, extremely interested.

"Come!--oh, it is no matter about going through the kitchen--come out a little while on the porch steps. Do you see that light spot in the woods up there? That is where we took the timber for the cow-house and the pigsty, two years ago."

He went out into the farmyard bare-headed.

"Marit, Marit, here is some one who wants to see your pigs. Now you shall be reviewed. There are a sow and seven--you see. Ugh, ugh, yes. Hear your little ones, Marit!--But it was the brick wall, you see. Right here was a swamp hole; it oozed through from the brook above. And now--see the drain there?--as dry as tinder."

Now or never the petition must be presented.

"And now they live like lords all together there," continued the captain.

"All seven of the dollars--what am I saying, all five of the pigs."

"What?"

"Here is your hat, father!"--Jörgen came from the house--"and there are some of the people down from Fosse standing there and waiting."

"So? We will only just look into the stable a little."

There stood Svarten and Brunen, just unharnessed, still dripping wet and with stiff hair after the work at the plough.

"Fine stall, eh?--and very light; the horses don't come out of the door half blind. Ho, Svarten, are you sweaty now?"

There was a warm and pleasant smell of the stable--and finally--

"Captain, I am going to make a re--"

"But, Ola," interrupted the latter, "see Brunen's crib there! I don't like those bits. It can't be that he bites it?"

"Ha, ha, ha--no, by no means." Ola grinned slyly; he was not going to admit in a stranger's presence that the captain's new bay was a cribber!

The captain had become very red; he pulled off his cap, and hurriedly walked along with it in his hand--"such a rascal of a horse-trader!"

He no longer looked as if he would listen to a request.

Out of the afternoon shade by the stable walls the two men just spoken of appeared.

"Is this a time of day to come to people?" he blurted out. "Ah well--go up to the office."

At this he strode over the yard, peeped into the well, and turned towards the window of the sitting-room.

"Girls! Inger-Johanna--Thinka," he called in a loud tone. "Ask Ma if that piece of meat is going to lie there by the well and rot."

"Marit has taken it up, we are going to have it for supper," Thinka tried to whisper.

"Oh! Is it necessary on that account to keep it where Pasop can get it?--Show the student down into the garden, so that he can get some currants," he called out of the door, as he went up by the stables to his office.

Arent Grip's head, covered with thick brown hair, with the scanty flat cap upon it, could now be seen for a good long time among the currant bushes by the side of Thinka's little tall, blond one. At first he talked a great deal, and the sprightly, bright, brown eyes were not in the least wicked, Thinka thought. She began to feel rather a warm interest in him.

He found his boots in the morning standing mended before his bed, and a tray with coffee and breakfast came up to him. He had said he must be off early.

Now it all depended on making his decisive leap with closed eyes in the dark.

When he came down, the captain stood on the stairs with his pipe. Over his fat neck, where the buckle of his military stock shone, grayish locks of hair stuck out under his reddish wig. He was looking out a little discontentedly into the morning fog, speculating on whether it would settle or rise so that he would dare order the mowing to go on.

"So you are going to start, my boy?"

"Captain, can--will you lend me--" in his first courage of the morning he had thought of five, but it sank to four even while he was on the stairs, and now in the presence of the captain to--"three dollars? I have used up every shilling I had to get to Christiania with. You shall have them by money order immediately."

The captain hemmed and hawed. He had almost suspected something of the sort yesterday in the fellow's face--yes, such a student was the kind of a fellow to send back a money order!

There began to be a sort of an ugly grin on his face. But suddenly he assumed a good-natured, free and easy mien. "Three dollars, you say?--If I had three in the house, my boy! But here, by fits and starts in the summer, it is as if the ready money was clean swept away." He stuck his unoccupied hand in the breast of his uniform coat, and looked vacantly out into the air. "Ah! hm-hm," came after a dreadfully oppressive pause. "If I was only sure of getting them back again, I would see if I could pick up three or four shillings at any rate in Ma's household box--so that you could get down to the sheriff or the judge. They are excellent people, I know them; they help at the first word."

The captain, puffing vigorously at his pipe, went into the kitchen to Ma, who was standing in the pantry and dealing out the breakfast. She had the hay-making and the whole of the outside affairs upon her shoulders.

He was away quite a little time.

"Well, if Ma did not have the three dollars after all! So I have got them for you. And so good-by from Gilje! Let us hear when you get there."

"You shall hear in a money order," and the student strode jubilantly away.

It is true that at first Ma had stopped for a moment and pinched her lips together, and then she had declared as her most settled opinion that, if the captain was going to help at all, it must be with all three. He did not seem one of those who shirked everything--was not one who was all surface--and it would not do at all to let him beg at the judge's, the sheriff's, and perhaps the minister's, because he could not get a loan of more than three shillings at Gilje.

From time to time Thinka told of all that she and the student had talked about together.

"What did he say then?" urged Inger-Johanna.

"Oh, he was entertaining almost all the time; I have never heard any one so entertaining."

"Yes, but do you remember that he said anything?"

"Oh, yes, he asked why you were reading French. Perhaps you were to be trained to be a parrot, so that you could chatter when you came to the city.

"So,--how did he know that I was going to the city?"

"He asked how old you were; and then I said that you were to be confirmed and to go there. He was very well acquainted at the governor's house; he had done extra writing, or something of that sort, at the office, since he had been a student."

"That kind of acquaintance, yes."

"But you wouldn't suit exactly there, he said; and do you know why?"

"No."

"Do you want to know? He thought you had too much backbone."

"What--did he say?"

She wrinkled her eyebrows and looked up sharply, so that Thinka hastened to add: "Whoever comes there must be able to wind like a sewing thread around the governor's wife, he said; it would be a shame for your beautiful neck to get a twist so early."

Inger-Johanna threw her head back and smiled: "Did you ever hear such a man!"

* * * * *

Thinka had gone to Ryfylke. Her place at the table, in the living-room, in the bed-chamber, was empty air. The captain started out time after time to call her.

And now the last afternoon had come, when Inger-Johanna was also going away.

The sealskin trunk with new iron bands stood open in the hall ready for packing. The cariole was standing in the shed, greased so that the oil was running out of the ends of the axles, and Great-Ola, who was to start the next morning on the three days' journey, was giving Svarten oats.

The captain had been terribly busy that day: no one understood how to pack as he did.

Ma handed over to him one piece of the new precious stuff after the other; the linen from Gilje would bear the eye of the governor's wife.

But the misfortune of it was that the blood rushed so to Jäger's head when he stooped over.

"Hullo, good! I don't understand what you are thinking of, Ma, to come with all that load of cotton stockings at once! It is this, this, this I want."

Naturally, used to travelling as he was--"But it is so bad for you to stoop over, Jäger."

He straightened up hurriedly. "Do you think Great-Ola has the wit to rub Svarten with Riga liniment on the bruise on his neck and to take the bottle with him in his bag? If I had not thought of that now, Svarten would have had to trot with it. Run down and tell him that, Thea.--Oh, no!" he drew a despairing breath; "I must go myself, and see that it is done right."

There was a pause until his footfall had ceased to creak on the lowest step. Then Ma began to pack with precipitous haste: "It is best to spare your father from the rush of blood to his head."

The contents of the trunk rose layer upon layer, until the white napkin was at last spread over it and covered the whole, and it only remained to sit upon the lid and force the key to turn in the lock.

Towards supper time the worst hubbub and trouble were over. Ma's hasty-pudding, as smooth as velvet, with raspberry sauce, was standing on the table, and solemnly reminded them that again there would be one less in the daily circle.

They ate in silence without any other sound than the rattling of the spoons.

"There, child, take my large cup. Take it when your father bids you."

Certainly she is beautiful, the apple of his eye. Only look at her hands when she is eating! She is as delicate and pale as a nun.

He sighed, greatly down-hearted, and shoved his plate from him.

Tears burst from Inger-Johanna's eyes.

No one would have any more.

Now he walked and whistled and gazed on the floor.

It was a pity to see how unhappy father was.

"You must write every month, child--at length and about everything--do you hear?--large and small, whatever you are thinking of, so that your father may have something to take pleasure in," Ma admonished, while they were clearing off the table. "And listen now, Inger-Johanna," she continued when they were alone in the pantry: "If it is so that the governor's wife wants to read your letters, then put a little cross by the signature. But if there is anything the matter, tell it to old Aunt Alette out in the bishop's mansion; then I shall know it when Great-Ola is in for the city load. You know your father can bear so little that is disagreeable."

"The governor's wife read what I write to you and father! That I will defy her to do."

"You must accommodate yourself to her wishes, child. You can do it easily when you try, and your aunt is extremely kind and good to those she likes, when she has things her own way. You know how much may depend on her liking you, and--you understand--getting a little fond of you. She has certainly not asked you there without thinking of keeping you in the place of a daughter."

"Any one else's daughter? Take me from you and father? No, in that case I would rather never go there."

She seated herself on the edge of the meal-chest and began to sob violently.

"Come, come, Inger-Johanna." Ma stroked her hair with her hand. "We do not wish to lose you; you know that well enough,"--her voice trembled. "It is for your own advantage, child. What do you think you three girls have to depend upon, if your father should be taken away? We must be glad if a place offers, and even take good care not to lose it; remember that, always remember that, Inger-Johanna. You have intelligence enough, if you can also learn to control your will; that is your danger, child."

Inger-Johanna looked up at her mother with an expression almost of terror. She had a bitter struggle to understand. In her, in whom she had always found aid, there was suddenly a glimpse of the helpless.

"I can hardly bear to lose the young one out of my sight to-night, and you leave me alone in there," came the captain, creaking in the door. "You haven't a thought of how desolate and lonesome it will be for me, Ma." He blew out like a whale.

"We are all coming in now, and perhaps father will sing a little this evening," Ma said encouragingly.

The captain's fine, now a little hoarse, bass was his pride and renown from his youth up.

The clavichord was cleared of its books and papers--the cover must be entirely lifted when father was to sing.

It stood there with its yellow teeth, its thin, high tone, and its four dead keys; and Ma must play the accompaniment, in which always, in some part or other, she was left lying behind, like a sack that has fallen out of a wagon, while the horse patiently trots on over the road. His impatience she bore with stoical tranquillity.

This evening he went through _Heimkringlas panna_, _du höga Nord_, and _Vikingebalken_, to

_Lo! the chase's empress cometh! Hapless Frithjof, glance away! Like a star on spring cloud sitteth she upon her courser gray._

He sang so that the window-panes rattled.

_Chapter IV_

The year had turned. It was as long after Christmas as the middle of February.

In the evening the captain was sitting, with two candles in tin candlesticks, smoking and reading _Hermoder_. At the other end of the table the light was used by Jörgen, who was studying his lessons; he must worry out the hours that had been assigned, whether he knew the lessons or not.

The frosty panes shone almost as white as marble in the moonlight, which printed the whole of a pale window on the door panel in the lower, unlighted end of the sitting-room.

Certainly there were bells!

Jörgen raised his head, covered with coarse, yellow hair, from his book. It was the second time he had heard them, far away on the hill; but, like the sentinels of Haakon Adelstensfostre at the beacon, of whom he was just reading, he did not dare to jump up from his reading and give the alarm until he was sure.

"I think there are bells on the road," he gently remarked, "far off."

"Nonsense! attend to your lesson."

But, notwithstanding he pretended that he was deeply absorbed in the esthetic depths of _Hermoder_, the captain also sat with open ears.

"The trader's bells--they are so dull and low," Jörgen put in again.

"If you disturb me again, Jörgen, you shall hear the bells about your own ears."

The trader, Öjseth, was the last one the captain could think of wishing to see at the farm. He kept writing and writing after those paltry thirty dollars of his, as if he believed he would lose them. "Hm! hm!" He grew somewhat red in the face, and read on, determined not to see the man before he was standing in the room.

The bells plainly stopped before the door.

"Hm! hm!"

Jörgen moved uneasily.

"If you move off the spot, boy, I'll break your arms and legs in pieces!" foamed the captain, now red as copper. "Sit--sit still and read!"

He intended also to sit still himself. That scoundrel of a trader--he should fasten his horse himself at the doorsteps, and help himself as he could.

"I hear them talking--Great-Ola."

"Hold your tongue!" said the captain in a murderous deep bass, and with a pair of eyes fixed on his son as if he could eat him.

"Yes; but, father, it is really--"

A pull on his forelock and a box on the ears sent him across the floor.

"The doctor," roared Jörgen.

The truth of his martyrdom was established in the same moment, because the short, square form of the military doctor appeared in the door.

His fur coat was all unbuttoned, and the tip of his long scarf trailed behind him on the threshold. He held his watch out: "What time is it?"

"Now, then, may the devil take your body and soul to hell, where you long ago belonged, if it isn't you, Rist!"

"What time is it? I say--Look!"

"And here I go and lick Jörgen for--well, well, boy, you shall be excused from your lesson and can ask for syrup on your porridge this evening. Go out to Ma, and tell her Rist is here."

The captain opened the kitchen door: "Hullo, Marit! Siri! A girl in here to pull off the doctor's boots! All the diseases of the country are in your clothes."

"What time is it, I say--can you see?"

"Twenty-five minutes of seven."

"Twenty-one miles in two hours and a quarter--from Jölstad here, with my bay!"

The doctor had got his fur coat off. The short, muscular man, with broad face and reddish-gray whiskers, stood there in a fur cap, swallowed up in a pair of long travelling boots.

"No, no," he exclaimed to the girl, who was making an effort to pull them off. "Oh, listen, Jäger; will you go out and feel of the bay's hind leg, if there is a wind-gall? He began to stumble a little, just here on the hill, I thought, and to limp."

"He has very likely got bruised." The captain eagerly grabbed his hat from the clavichord and went with him.

Outside by the sleigh they stood, thinly clothed in the severe frost, and felt over the hamstring and lifted up the left hind foot of the bay. For a final examination, they went into the stable.

When they came out there was a veritable wild dispute.

"I tell you, you might just as well have said he had glanders in his hind legs. If you are not a better judge of curing men than you are of horses, I wouldn't give four shillings for your whole medical examination."

"That brown horse of yours, Jäger--that is a strange fodder he takes. Doesn't he content himself with crib-splinters?" retorted the doctor, slyly bantering.

"What? Did you see that, you--knacker?"

"Heard it, heard it; he gnawed like a saw there in the crib. He has cheated you unmercifully--that man from Filtvedt, you know."

"Oh, oh, in a year he will be tall enough for a cavalry horse. But this I shall concede, it was a good trade when you got the bay for sixty-five."

"Sixty and a binding dram, not a doit more. But I would not sell him, if you offered me a hundred on the spot."

Ma was waiting in her parlor.

Now, it was Aslak of Vaelta who had cut his foot last Thursday hewing timber--Ma had bandaged him--and then Anders, who lived in the cottage, was in a lung fever. The parish clerk had been there and bled him; six children up in that hut--not good if he should be taken away.

"We will put a good Spanish-fly blister on his back, and, if that does not make him better, then a good bleeding in addition."

"He came near fainting the last time," suggested Ma, doubtfully.

"Bleed--bleed--it is the blood which must be got away from the chest, or the inflammation will make an end of him. I will go and see him to-morrow morning--and for Thea's throat, camphor oil and a piece of woollen cloth, and to bed to sweat--and a good spoonful of castor-oil to-night--you can also rub the old beggar woman about the body with camphor, if she complains too much. I will give you some more."

After supper the old friend of the house sat with his pipe and his glass of punch at one end of the sofa, and the captain at the other. The red tint of the doctor's nose and cheeks was not exclusively to be attributed to the passage from the cold to the snug warmth of the room. He had the reputation of rather frequently consoling his bachelorhood with ardent spirits.

They had talked themselves tired about horses and last year's reminiscences of the camp, and had now come to more domestic affairs.

"The news, you see, is blown here both from the city and the West; old Aunt Alette wrote before Christmas that the governor's wife had found out she must drive with both snaffle and curb."

"I thought so," said the doctor, chewing his mouthpiece. "The first thing of importance in managing is to study the nature of the beast; and Inger-Johanna's is to rear; she must be treated gently."

"And that sister-in-law never believed that so much inborn stuff could grow up in the wild mountain region."

The captain began to puff impatiently. Ma would surely sometime get supper ready and come in, so he could get to his daughter's letters.

"You can believe he is a real pelican, that old judge down in Ryfylke! Orders them round and bellows--keeps them hot both in the office and in the house. I wonder if he won't sometime apply for an office somewhere else; for that is what he threatens to do every time he sees an office vacant, Thinka writes. Let us have the letters, Ma, and my spectacles," he exclaimed, when she came in. "The first is of November, so you shall hear about your goddaughter's coming to the governor's, Rist."

He hummed over a part of the beginning and then read:

When Great-Ola put my baggage inside the street door, I almost wanted to seat myself in the cariole and drive the three days home again; but then at once I thought, best to march straight on, as father says! I went past the servant and inside the hall door. It was very light there, and a great many outside garments and hats and caps were hanging on the pegs, and twice two servant-girls flew through with trays and teacups, without troubling themselves about me in the least. But I thought that the one who had fallen into the midst of things was your beloved daughter. My outside garments were off in a jiffy; I knocked once, twice, three times. I hardly knew what to do with myself, so I gently turned the knob. Thank heaven, there was no one there. There was another door with a portière, which I only needed to shove a little aside, and then--I was plunged right into the centre of it. Nay, how shall I describe it? It was a corner room that I had entered: there was only mahogany furniture and upholstered easy chairs, and pictures in gilded frames over the sofa; the other pictures were in dark frames; but I did not see a doit of all that, for I thought at first that it was dark. But it wasn't dark at all. There was just a shade over the astral lamp on the table, and neither more nor less than a whole company. There in the lion's den, with the married ladies on the corner sofa, sat a number of people drinking tea.

I stood there in the middle of the floor, and the reddish brown linsey-woolsey, I believed, could surely defend itself.

"Aunt Zittow," I ventured.

"Who is it?--What? Can it be my dear Inger-Johanna? My husband's niece!" was said from the table. "You have come just like a wild mountain rose, child, with the rain still on your face--and so cold!" as she touched me. But I saw very well that she had her eye on my dress. I am sure it is too long in the waist, I thought; that is what I said at home. But then I forgot the whole dress, for it was indeed my aunt, and she embraced me and said, "You are heartily welcome, my dear child! I think now a cup of good hot tea will do her good, Miss Jörgensen,--and will you ask Mina to put her room in order upstairs!" And then she seated me on a soft cushioned chair by the side of the wall.

There I sat in the twilight, with a teacup in my lap, and biscuits--how I got them I cannot remember--and thought, is it I or not I?

At first it was not easy to see those who sat about in the soft stuffed chairs; what I saw nearest to me was a piece of a foot, with spurs and a broad red stripe along the side, which rocked up and down the whole time. Now and then a head with a fine lace cap bobbed up into the light to put down a cup or to replenish it. The lamp-shade made just a round ring in the room, not a foot from the table.

Oh, how warm and delicate it was!

In the light under the astral lamp-shade, aunt was sitting, bowed down over a little black contrivance with the image of a negro on it, and was burning pastilles; her hair, on both sides of her forehead, was made into stiff, grayish curls.

The bright, shining tea-kettle stood singing over the beautiful blue cups of that old Copenhagen porcelain, of which you have four pairs in the cabinet, which came from grandmother's. I could not help looking all the time on aunt's face, with the great earrings showing through the lace. I thought the antique tea-kettle, which is like a vase or urn, resembled her so much, with the haughty stiff curve of her chin! It was just as if they belonged together from--I don't know from what time, it could not be from the time of the creation, I suppose. And then when the conversation among them came to a stop and it was still as if there were not a human being there, the machine puffed and snorted as it were with aunt's fine Danish twist to the R: _Arvet! Arvet!_ (inherited)--and in between it bubbled Zittow, von Zittow. It was what you told me, mother, about the Danish Zittow, who was diplomatist in Brussels, that was buzzing in me.

"The young one! She has got it in her blood," whinnied the doctor.

But it really did not look as if aunt thought there was any hurry about seeing uncle. And then when aunt sent Miss Jörgensen with some tea into the next room, where they were playing cards, I at once asked if I could be allowed to go with her.

"With all my heart, my child, it would be a shame to tax your patience any longer. And then, Miss Jörgensen, take our little traveller up to her room, and see that she has something to eat, and let her go to bed." But I saw very plainly that she pulled the lamp-shade down on the side I was going; that I thought of afterwards.

"What? what? what?" said my uncle. You should have seen him gaze at me. He looked so much like you, mother, about the forehead and eyes that I threw my arms around his neck.

He held me before him with his arms stretched out. "But really I think it is Aunt Eleonore all over! Well, well, now don't fancy you are such a beauty!"

That was the reception.

Shortly after I was lying in bed in my elegant little blue room, with curtains with long fringes. There were pastilles on the stove, and Miss Jörgensen--just think, she called me Miss!--almost undressed me and put me between all the soft down quilts.

There I lay and thought it all over, and became hotter and hotter in my head and face, till at last it seemed as if I was thumping in the cariole with Svarten and Ola.

"No, the cariole came home again empty," said the captain with a sigh.

"Look out if you don't get her back to Gilje again in a carriage," added the doctor.

"She was so handsome, Rist," exclaimed the captain, quite moved. "It seems as if I see her, standing there in the middle of the floor at brother-in-law's, with her heavy black hair dressed upon her neck. From the time when she used to run about here, with the three long braids down her back, it was as if she developed into a swan all at once, when she came to dress in the clothes of a full-grown person--You remember her on confirmation day, Rist?"

"But, dear Jäger," said Ma, trying to subdue him.

The captain cautiously unfolded a letter, closely written on a large sheet of letter paper.

"And now you shall hear; this is dated January 23d."

The money which I brought with me--

"Well, well--"

The bill of Larsen for--

"You can certainly skip over to the next page," remarked Ma with a certain emphasis.

"Well, yes, hm, hm,--mere trifles--here it is."

To think that father, and you also, mother, cannot see my two new dresses! Aunt is inconceivably good. It is impossible to walk any other way than beautifully in this kind of shoes; and that aunt says I do; it is just as if you always felt a dancing-floor under your feet. And yesterday aunt gave me a pair of patent leather sandals with buckles on the ankles. Did you ever hear of such! Yes--I kissed her for that, too, this time; she could say what she liked. For you must know, she says that the first rule of life for a lady is a kind of confident, reserved repose, which, however, may be cordial! I have it naturally, aunt says, and only need to cultivate it. I am going to learn to play on the piano and go through a regular course of lessons in dancing.

Aunt is so extremely good to me, only she will have the windows shut when I want them open. Of course I don't mean in the sitting-room, where they have pasted themselves in with double panes, but up in my own room. Just fancy, first double windows and then stuffy curtains, and then all the houses, which are near us across the street; you can't breathe, and much use it is to air out the rooms by the two upper panes twice a day!

Aunt says that I shall gradually get accustomed to the city air. But I don't see how I can, when I never get acquainted with it. Not once during the whole winter have I frozen my fingers! We go out for a short drive in the forenoon, and then I go with aunt in the shops in the afternoon, and that is the whole of it. And you can believe it is quite another thing to go out here than at home; when I only jumped over a little pile of shovelled-up snow, in order to get into the sleigh more quickly, aunt said that every one could instantly see manners from my state of nature, as she always says. For all the movements I make, I might just as well have chains on both legs, like the prisoners we see some days in the fort.

And now aunt wants me not to go bare-footed on the floor of my chamber. Nay, you should have seen her horror when I told her how Thinka and I, at the time of the breaking up of the ice last year, waded across the mill stream in order to avoid the roundabout way by the bridge! At last I got her to laughing with me. But I certainly believe that the pair of elegant slippers with swansdown on them, which stuck out of a package this morning, are for me! You see now, it is into them, nevertheless, that my sweet little will must be put.

"She is on her guard lest they should want to put a halter about her neck," mumbled the doctor.

Ma sighed deeply. "Such sweet small wills are so apt to grow into big ones, and"--again a sigh--"women don't get on in the world with that."

The doctor looked meditatively down into his glass: "One of woman's graces is flexibility, they say; but on the other hand, she is called 'proud maiden' in the ballad. There is something like a contradiction in that."

"Oh, the devil! Divide them into two platoons! It is mostly the ugly who have to be pliable," said the captain.

"Beauty does not last so very long, and so it is best to think of the years when one has to be accommodating," remarked Ma, down in her knitting-work.

The captain continued reading the letter.

The French is done in a twinkling. I am always ready with that before breakfast, and aunt is so contented with my pronunciation; but then the piano comes from nine to eleven. Ugh! only exercises; and then aunt receives calls. Guess who came day before yesterday? No one else than Student Grip. It was just as if I must have known him ever so well, and liked him even better, so glad was I at last to see any one who knew about us at home. But just think, I am not entirely sure that he did not try to dictate to aunt; and then he had the boldness to look at me as if I should agree with him. Aunt helped him to a place in uncle's office, because she heard that he had passed such an excellent examination and was so gifted, but had almost nothing from home to study on.

"I ventured my three dollars on him--But how the fellow could manage to take such high honors passes my comprehension," threw out the captain.

"But he repaid them all right, Jäger, with postage and everything."

The captain held the letter up to the light again.

And then aunt thought he would be the better for a little polish in his ways, and enjoined him to come to her fortnightly receptions; she likes to have young people about her; but he let aunt see that he regarded that as a command and compulsion. And now he came in fact to make a sort of excuse. But how they talked!

"Well, then, we shall see you again at some of our Thursday evenings?" said aunt.

"Your ladyship no doubt remembers the occasion of my remaining away. It was my ill-bred objections to the seven unanimous teacups which gave supreme judgment in your celebrated small tea-fights."

"See, see, see," aunt smiled. "I can't be wrong when I say that you are really made for social life; there is need just there for all one's best sides."

"All one's smoothest, your ladyship means."

"Well, well, no falling back, Mr. Grip, I beg you."

"I did my best, your ladyship; for I really thought all one's most mendacious."

"Now you are in the humor of contradiction again; and there one gets entangled so easily, you know."

"I only think that when one does not agree with what is said, and keeps silent, one lies."

"Then people offer up to good form, without which no social intercourse can exist."

"Yes, what do they offer up? Truth!"

"Perhaps more correctly a little of their vanity, an opportunity of exhibiting some bright and shining talent; that tempts young men greatly, I believe."

"Possible, not impossible at any rate," he admitted.

"Do you see?" But then aunt said, for she never abandons her text: "A little good manners is not out of place; and when I see a bright young student stand talking with his hands in his pockets, or riding backwards on a chair, then, whether the one concerned takes my motherly candor ill or not, I always try by a little hint to adjust the defects in his education."

You should have seen him! Hands out of his pockets, and at once he sat up before her, as straight as a candle.

"If all were like your ladyship, I would recommend making calls," said he, "for you are an honest woman."

"Woman! We say, lady."

"I mean an honest governor's lady; besides, I don't at all say a good-natured!" and then he shook that great brown lock of hair down over his forehead.

I do not need to wish for any portrait of you, for I lie thinking, in the evenings, that I am at home. I see father so plainly, walking up and down the room whistling, and then starting off up the office stairs; and I pull your hair, Jörgen! and poke your head down into the geography, so that I get you after me, and we run round, in one door and out another, up and down in the house. Nay, I long horribly at times. But I must not let aunt see that; it would be ungrateful. She does not believe that one can exist anywhere but in a city.

And then there are a lot of things which I have been obliged to draw a black mark through, because I don't at all understand them. Only think, mother! Aunt says, that it may at most be allowable to say that we have cows at home; but I must not presume to say that any one of them has a calf! I should like to know how they think we get new cows, when we kill the old ones for Christmas?

Here the captain interpolated some inarticulate noises. But an expression of anxiety came over Ma's face, and she said faintly:

"That is because, unfortunately, we have not been able to keep the children sufficiently away from the servants' room, and from everything they hear there."

"You see, madam," declared the doctor, "in the city people are so proper that a hen hardly dares to lay eggs--It is only the products of the efforts of the land that they are willing to recognize, I can tell you."

"No," the captain put in, "it is not advisable for a poor mare to be so indiscreet as to have a foal there."

His wife coughed gently and made an errand to her sewing-table.

Ma had been gone upstairs for more than an hour, and the clock was getting on towards twelve.

The captain and the doctor were now sitting somewhat stupidly over the heeltaps in their mugs, a little like the dying tallow candles, which stood with neglected wicks, almost burned down into the sockets and running down.

"Keep your bay, Rist. Depend on me--he has got to get up early who takes me in on a horse--with my experience, you see. All the cavalry horses I have picked out in my time!"

The doctor sat looking down into his glass.

"You are thinking of the cribber," said the captain, getting into a passion; "but that was the most rascally villainy--pure cheating. He might have been taken into court for that--But, as I tell you, keep your bay."

"I have become a little tired of him, you see."

"See there, see there,--but that is your own fault and not the bay's, my boy. You are always tired of the beast you have. If you should count all the horses you have swapped, it would be a rare stable."

"They spoiled him for driving when he was a colt; he is one-sided, he is."

"That's all bosh. I should cure him of that in a fortnight, with a little breaking to harness."

"Oh, I am tired of sitting and pulling and hauling on one rein to keep him out of the side of the ditch; if it were not for that, the beast should never go out of my hand. No, had it been only that he made a few splinters in the crib."

The captain assumed a thoughtful expression; he leaned against the back of the sofa, and gave two or three deep, strong pulls on his pipe.

"But my Brunen is nothing at all to talk about--a little gnawing only--with the one eye-tooth."

"Nay, my bay also gives way only on one side of the road."

Again two or three sounding puffs. The captain gave his wig a poke.

"If there is any one who could cure him of that, it is certainly I."

Dense smoke poured out of his pipe.

Over in his corner of the sofa the doctor began to clean his out.

"Besides, my Brunen is a remarkably kind animal--thunders a little on the crib down in the stall--a horse can hardly have less of a fault, and then so thoroughly easy on the rein--knows if one only touches it--so extremely sensitive in his mouth--a regular beauty to drive on the country road."

"Ye-s, ye-s; have nothing against that--fine animal!"

"Look here, Rist! All things considered, that was a driving horse for you--stands so obediently, if one just lays the rein over his back."

"Swap off the bay, do you mean?" pondered the doctor, in a doubting tone,--"hadn't really thought of that." He shook his head--"Only I can't understand why he is so stiff on one rein."

"No, my boy; but I can understand it."

"If you are only not cheated in that, Jäger--trade is trade, you know."

"I cheated? Ha, ha, ha!" The captain shook with laughter and with quiet consciousness. "Done, boy! We will swap."

"You are rather quick on the rein, Jäger."

"Always my nature, you see--to get the thing closed up at once, on the nail. And so we will take a drink to close the bargain," shouted the captain eagerly; he pulled his wig awry, and sprang up.

"Let us see if Ma has some cognac in the closet."

What sort of a trick was it the horse had?

The captain was wholly absorbed in breaking the bay to harness. The horse turned his head to the right, and kept over on the side of the road just as far as he could for the rein. It was impossible to find any reason for it.

This morning he had broken off one of the trace-pins by driving against the gate-post. Was it possible that he was afraid of a shadow? That was an idea!--and the captain determined to try him in the moonlight that evening.

When he came down to the stable after dinner, he saw a wonderful sight.

Great-Ola had taken the bay out of his stall, and was standing shaking his fist against the horse's forehead.

"Well, I have tried him every way, Captain, but he wouldn't wink, not even if I broke his skull with the back of an axe--he doesn't move! And now see how he jumps!" He raised his hand towards the other side of the horse's head. "But in his left eye he is as blind as a shut cellar door."

The captain stood awhile without saying a word; the veins on his forehead swelled up blue, and his face became as red as the collar on his uniform coat.

"Well, then." In a rage he gave Ola a box on his ears. "Are you standing there threatening the horse, you dog?"

When Ola was feeding the horse at night, the captain went into the stall. He took the lantern and let it shine on the bay. "No use to cure you of going into the ditch--See there, Ola, take that shilling, so that you at all events may profit by it."

Ola's broad face lighted up with cunning. "The doctor must provide himself with planks, for the one he got ate up three two-inch boards while we had him."

"Look here, Ola," nodded the captain, "it is not worth while to let him hear anything but that the bay can see with both eyes here with us."

When Great-Ola, in breaking-up time in spring, was driving a load of wood home from the Gilje ridge, he was obliged to turn out on a snow-drift for Dr. Rist, who was coming in a sleigh from the north.

"Driving with the bay, I see. Has the captain got him so that he's all right? Does he cling just as hard to the side of the road?"

"No, of course not. The captain was the man to make that all right. He is no more one-sided now than I am."

"As if I was going to believe that, you liar," mumbled the doctor, while he whipped his horse and drove on.

_Chapter V_

The captain was in a dreadful humor; the doors were banging the whole forenoon.

At dinner time there was a sultry breathing spell, during which Jörgen and Thea sat with their eyes on their plates, extremely cautious not to give any occasion for an explosion.

The fruit of Jörgen's best exertions to keep himself unnoticed was nevertheless, as usual, less happy. During the soup he accidentally made a loud noise in eating with his spoon which led to a thundering "Don't slobber like a hog, boy."

After dinner the captain all at once felt the necessity of completing certain computations on a chart and surveying matter that had been left since the autumn.

And now it was not advisable to come too near the office! He had an almost Indian quickness of hearing for the least noise, and was absolutely wild when he was disturbed.

It became quiet, a dead calm over the whole house. The spinning-wheel alone could be heard humming in the sitting-room, and they went gently through the doors below, in genuine terror when in spite of all they creaked or some one happened to let the trap-door into the cellar fall or make the porch door rattle.

How could that foolish Torbjörg hit upon scouring the stairs now? When she hurriedly retreated with her sand and pail, her open mouth and staring eyes showed plainly that she did not comprehend the peculiar inward connection between her scouring and the captain who was sitting safely up there in his office: it was enough that he would fall at once like a tempest down from the upper story.

Now there was a call from up there.

He came out from the office with his drawing-pen in his mouth:

What had become of the old blue portfolio of drawings? It had been lying on the table in the hall upstairs--

Ma must go up, and Thea and Jörgen with her, to be questioned.

There--there on the table--there! it had been lying for five months! Was it the intention to make him entirely miserable with all this putting in order and cleaning?

"But dear, dear Jäger, we shall find it, if you will only have a little patience--if we only look for it."

And there was a search round about everywhere; even in the garret, under old window-panes, and among tables, reels, chests, and old trumpery they ransacked. In his anxious zeal, Jörgen stood on his head, digging deep down into a barrel, when Ma at length sagaciously turned the investigation into the office again. "On top of the cabinet in the office there is a large blue portfolio, but you have looked there, of course."

"There? I--I should like to know who has presumed to--"

He vanished into the office again.

Yes, there it lay.

He flung down his ruling-pen; he really was not in a mood to work any longer! He sat looking gloomily out before him with his elbows leaning against his writing-desk. "It is your fault I say, Ma!--or was it possibly I who had the smart idea of sending her to Ryfylke?" He struck the desk. "It is blood money--blood money, I say! If it is to go on in this way, what shall we have to get Jörgen on with?--Huf, it goes to my head so--eighteen dollars actually thrown into the brook."

"She must have a Sunday dress; Thinka has now worn the clothes she brought from home over a year and a half."

"Even new laced cloth shoes from Stavanger. Yes, indeed, not less than from Stavanger--it is put down so--" he snatched the bill from the desk--"and a patent leather belt, and for half-soling and mending shoes two dollars and a quarter--and then sewing things! I never heard that a young girl in a house bought sewing things--and postage a dollar and a half--it is wholly incredible."

"For the year and a half, you must remember, Jäger, fifteen cents for each letter."

"A miserly judge, I say, who does not even pay for the letters which go from the office! Now, why did she write last when she had just before sent messages in the letter from your sister-in-law? But there it comes with a vengeance--four and a half yards of silk ribbon! Why didn't she make it ten, twenty yards--as long as from here to Ryfylke? Then she might have broken her father at once; for I see what it leads to."

"Remember they go on visits and to parties at the sheriffs, the minister's, and the solicitor's, very often; we must let her go decently dressed."

"Oh, I never heard before that daughters must cost money. It is a brand-new rule you have hit upon; and what is it coming to?"

"He who will not sow, Jäger, shall not reap."

"Yes, don't you think it looks like a fine harvest--this country Adonis there in the office, who casts sheep's eyes at her--a poor clerk who does not have to pass an examination! But he is so quick at the partition of inheritances, ha, ha."

Ma seemed to be a little overcome, and gazed before her hopelessly.

"Ye-es, Thinka wrote that; he is so quick in the partition of inheritances, he is! Don't you think that was rather a nice introduction by her for him?" He hummed. "It is clear as mud that she is taken with him; otherwise your sister-in-law would not have written about it as she did."

"Thinka has a gentle nature," came the answer somewhat slowly and thoughtfully, "and is certainly so easily hoodwinked, poor thing, warm and susceptible as she is; but still she has now seen enough of the world about her!"

"Yes, the world does not move in verse! As Lieutenant Bausback said when he paid his debts with old Mother Stenberg; she was exactly three and a half times as old as he when they were married."

"She has always been pliable--we may hope that she is amenable to a word from her parents. I will write and represent to her the prospects."

"The prospects! Don't meddle with that, Ma! Marriages don't grow on trees. Or what kind of a match do you think Thinka can make up here? When I am old and retired on a pension, it is a nice lookout with all our daughters on our hands! Don't let us be mad with pride, Ma, stark mad! That runs in your blood and that of all the Zittows."

Ma's lips stiffened a little and her eyes looked keenly black; but it was over in a moment. "I think that after all we might economize on pork and butter here in the house; it is not half so salt as it is used in many places for servants, and then, when the pigs--only the hams, I mean--can go with the load to the city, then we can very likely find some way to get the money in again. Otherwise, I should be entirely disheartened. But if we are to send the money, I think you ought to send it to the post-office at once, Jäger. They ought not to see anything but that you pay cash down."

The captain rose and puffed. "Ten and five are fifteen--and three are eighteen." He counted the money out of a drawer in his desk. "We shall never see the money again. Where are the scissors, the scissors, I say?"

He began to cut the envelope for the money letter out of an old gray wrapper of an official letter, which he turned.

"Your coat and comforter are lying here, by the stove," said Ma, when she came in again.

"There. Put the sealing-wax and seal in the inside pocket, so that I shall not forget them; otherwise I must pay for sealing."

It was as if the captain's bad humor had been swept away when he came back hastily from the post-office. He had found a letter from Inger-Johanna, and immediately began to peep into it; but it became too dark.

His coat was off in a trice, and, with his hat still on, he began eagerly to read by the newly lighted candle.

"Ma! Ma! Tell Ma to come in at once--and another candle!"

He could not see any more, as the candle made a halo of obscurity, and they had to wait till the wick burned up again.

Ma came in, turning down her sleeves after the baking.

"Now you shall hear," he said.

That such a ball cannot last longer! Aunt would like to be one of the first to leave, so during the cotillion I sit in constant anxiety lest she shall order the sleigh. Then I am examined; but then, it is now no longer as it was the first two or three times we drove home, when I chattered and blabbed out every possible thing, turned my soul and all my feelings inside out as a pocket into aunt's bosom.

Yesterday I was at my seventh, and am already engaged way into the ninth; which still will not be my last, I hope, this winter (I led five times). Yesterday, also, I happily escaped Lieutenant Mein, the one with Jörgen's bridle in his mouth, who has begun to want to make sure of me for the cotillion, as he says. He sits and stands in the companies at home at aunt's (which is all he does, as there is not a word in his mouth), and only looks and glowers at me.

Well, you should see my dancing cards! I think I have led a third part of all the dances this winter. Aunt has made me a present of a sash buckle which is beautiful, and, with all the dark yellow stones, improves the dress wonderfully. Aunt has taste; still we never agree when I dress. Old Aunt Alette was up here yesterday, and I got her on my side. So I was relieved from having earrings dangling about my ears; they felt as if two bits of a bridle rein were hanging behind me, and then I must be allowed to have sleeves wide enough to move my arm if I am not to feel like a wooden doll.

You must know that I have grown three inches since I left home. But never in my life have I really known what it is to exist, I believe, till this winter. When I shut my eyes, it is as if I can see in a dream a whole series of balls, with chandeliers under which music is floating, and I am dancing, and am led through the throng, which seems to make way for me.

I understand how Aunt Eleonore must have felt, she who was so beautiful, and whom they say I resemble so; she died after a ball, Aunt Alette says; it must have been of joy. There is nothing like dancing; nothing like seeing them competing for engagements, kneeling, as it were, with their eyes, and then becoming confused when I answer them in the way they don't expect.

And how many times do you really think now I have heard that I have such wonderful black hair, such wonderful firm eyes, such a superb bearing; how many times do you think it has been said in the most delicate manner and in the crudest? Aunt has also begun to admire; I could wish that the whole winter, my whole life (so long as I am beautiful, no longer), were one single ball, like the Polish count who drove over sugar.

And then I have always such a desire to die after every time, when I am lying and thinking of it, and, as it were, hear the music in my ears, until I come to think of the next one.

For that I am going to have a new dress, light yellow with black; that and white are most becoming to me, aunt says, and then again, new yellow silk shoes, buttoned up to the ankles; aunt says that my high instep betrays race, and that I feel I have; truly, I don't mind speaking right out what I think; and it is so amusing to see people open their eyes and wonder what sort of a person I am.

I really begin to suspect that several of our gentlemen have never seen a living pig, or a duck, or a colt (which is the prettiest thing I know). They become so stupid as soon as I merely name something from the country; it might be understood if I said it in French--_un canard_, _un cheval_, _un cochon_, _une vache_.

Student Grip contends that of those who have been born in the city not one in ten has ever seen a cow milked. He also provokes aunt by saying that everything which happens in French is so much finer, and thinks that we like to read and cry over two lovers who jump into the water from _Pont Neuf_; but only let the same thing happen here at home, from Vaterland's bridge, then it is vulgar; and indeed I think he is often right. Aunt has to smile. And however much she still says he lacks in polished manners and inborn culture, she is amused at him. And so they are everywhere, for he is invited out every single day in the week.

He generally comes Sunday afternoons and for coffee, for then he is sure that both aunt and I are bored, he says (yes, horribly; now, how can he know that?), and that he is not obliged to walk on stilts, and tell lies among the blue teacups.

And then he and aunt are amusing with a vengeance, when he speaks freely, and aunt opposes him and takes him down. For he thinks for himself always; that I can see when he is sitting with his head on one side and gently stirring his spoon in his cup. It makes one smile, for if he means No, you can see it from the top of his head long before he says it.

He is not a little talked about in the city as one of the worst of the Student Society in being zealous for all their wild ideas. But aunt finds him piquant, and thinks that youth must be suffered to sow its wild oats. On the contrary, uncle says that this kind is more ruinous for a young man's future than the worst transgressions, since it destroys his capacity for discipline.

What he thinks of me I should like to know. Sometimes he asks, impertinently, "You are going to the ball this evening, I suppose, Miss Jäger?"

But I have it out with him to the best of my ability, ask aunt for advice about some fancy work, and yawn so comfortably, and look out of the window just when he is most excited. I see very well it provokes him, and the last time he asked if Miss Jäger would not abstract her thoughts from the next ball for a moment.

Uncle is often cross at his perverseness, and contends that he is a disagreeable person; but I don't believe he would readily let him go from the office, since he is so capable.

Uncle lives only in his work; he is so tremendously noble. You should hear how he can go and worry for the least fault or want of punctuality in his office.

"I think the devil is in the fellow--now he _is_ governor," the captain declared. "He has reached the highest grade and can't be removed, and has no need to worry."

"Poor Josiah," sighed Ma, "he was always the most sensitive of my brothers; but the best head."

"Yes, the judge at Ryfylke took both force and will for his part."

* * * * *

A fortnight later they were surprised by a letter from the governor's wife, with one from Inger-Johanna enclosed.

The governor's lady must, in any event, be allowed to keep her dear Inger-Johanna at least a year longer; she had become indispensable both to her and the governor, so that it was even difficult for them to realize that she could have another home.

She has spoiled her uncle by the young life she has brought into the house. My dear Zittow with his scrupulous conscientiousness is overburdened with anxieties and responsibilities in his great office, and is sadly in need of amusements and recreation after so many wakeful nights. Nay, so egotistical are we, that I will propose that we divide her in the most unjust manner--that she shall make a visit home this summer, but only to come down to us again. Anything else would be a great disappointment.

But do not let us bring a possibly unnecessary apple of discord upon the carpet too easily; it might turn out like the treaty between the great powers about the beautiful island in the Mediterranean; during the diplomatic negotiations it vanished. And indeed I lack very little of being ready to guarantee that our dear subject of dispute will in a short time herself rule over a home, which will be in proportion to what she with her nature and beauty can lay claim to.

That I, as her aunt, should be somewhat blindly partial to her, I can hardly believe; at least I can cite an experienced, well-informed person of the same mind in our common friend, Captain Rönnow, who last week came here with the royal family from Stockholm, and, in parenthesis be it said--it must be between us--is on the point of having an extraordinary career. He was thoroughly enthusiastic at seeing Inger-Johanna again, and declared that she was a perfect beauty and a born lady, who was sure to excite attention in circles which were even above the common, and much more which we ought not to let our dear child hear. I can only add that on leaving he warmly, and with a certain anxiety, recommended me to keep and still further develop her.

If not just in his first youth, he is at least perhaps _the_, or at any rate one of the, most elegant and most distinguished men in the army, and it would not be difficult for him to win even the most pretentious.

"No, I should say that, by George. Well, Ma," said he, winking, "what do you say now? Now, I think it is all going on well."

The captain took a swinging march over the floor, and then fell upon Inger-Johanna's letter.

DEAR PARENTS,--Now I must tell you something. Captain Rönnow has been here. He came just as aunt had a reception. He looks twice as handsome and brave as he did when he was at our house at Gilje, and I saw plainly that he started a little when he got his eye on me, even while he stopped and paid his respects to aunt.

My heart beat rapidly, you must know, as soon as I saw him again; for I was really half afraid that he would have forgotten me.

But he came up and took both my hands and said very warmly, "The bud which I last saw at Gilje is now blossomed out."

I blushed a little, for I knew very well that it was he who from the first brought it about that I came here.

But I call that finished manners and an easy, straightforward way of conducting himself. Entertaining as he was, he never lost a particle of his grand manly dignity, and there was hardly a question of paying attention to any other person than to him in particular the whole evening. I must admit that hereafter I shall have another standard for a real gentleman whom I would call a man, and there are certainly many who do not come up to it.

Aunt has also expatiated on his manner; I believe she was flattered because he was so kind and cordial to me, she has ever since been in such excellent humor.

After that he was here daily. He had so much to tell us about life in Stockholm and at the court, and always talked to me about you at home, about father, who although he was older--

"Much, much older, yes," put in the captain eagerly, "about four or five years, at least."

--always was his never-to-be-forgotten friend.

You can believe those were pleasant evenings. Aunt understands such things. There is a great void since he is gone. Aunt thinks so, too. We have sat talking about him, and hardly anything else than him, these two evenings since he went away.

Yesterday evening Grip came again. We have not seen him at all since the first time Captain Rönnow was here. And can any one imagine such a man? He seems to see nothing in him. He sat and contradicted, and was so cross and disagreeable the whole evening that aunt was quite tired of him. He argued about living externally, hollow drum, and some such things, as if it were not just the genuine manliness and naturalness that one must value so much in Captain Rönnow.

Oh, I lay half the night angry. He sat playing with his teacup and talked about people who could go through the world with a silk ribbon of phrases and compliments: that one could flatter to death a sound understanding, so that at last there was left only a plucked--I plainly heard him mumble--wild goose. Dreadful insolence! I am sure he meant me.

When he had gone aunt also said that hereafter she should refuse to receive him, when there was no other company present; she was tired of his performances _en tête-à-tête_; that sort of men must have a certain restraint put upon them. He will never have any kind of a career, she thought, he carries his own notions too high.

However, it will be very tiresome if he stays away; for with all his peculiarities he is very often a good war comrade for me against aunt.

_Chapter VI_

The captain had kept the cover of his old large meerschaum pipe polished with chalk for three days, without being willing to take it down from the shelf; he had trimmed and put in new mouthpieces, and held a feast of purification on the remainder, as well as on all the contents of the tobacco table, the ash receiver, the tobacco stems, and lava-like scrapings from the pipe. He had let the sexton do his best at tuning the clavichord, and put two seats, painted white, on the stoop. The constantly neglected lattice-work around the garden now glistened here and there with fresh white palings, like single new teeth which are stuck between a whole row of old gray ones. The walks in the garden must be swept and garnished, the yard was cleaned up, and, finally, the cover put on the well, which was to have been done all the years when the children were small.

It was the captain who, in an almost vociferous good humor, was zealously on the move everywhere.

Sometimes he took a kind of rest and stood puffing on the steps or in the window of the large room which looked down toward the country highway; or in the shades of the evening he took a little turn down to the gate and sat there on the stone fence with his pipe. If any one passed by going south, he would say, "Are you going to the store to buy a plug of tobacco, Lars? If you meet a fine young lady in a cariole, greet her from the captain at Gilje; it is my daughter who is coming from the city."

If the person was some poor old crone of the other sex, to her astonishment a copper coin fell down on the road before her: "There, Kari; there, Siri: you may want something to order a crutch carriage with."

A surprise which was so much the greater as the captain at other times cherished a genuine liking for flaying old beggar women. The whole stock of tempestuous oaths and of abusive words coined in the inspiration of the moment, which was in his blood from the drill-ground and military life, must now and then have an outbreak. The old women who went on crutches were long accustomed to this treatment, and knew what to expect when they were going away from the house, after having first got a good load in their bags in the kitchen. It was like a tattoo about their ears, accompanied by Pasop's wild barking.

But in these days, while he was going about in joyful expectation and awaiting his daughter's return home, he was what made him a popular man both in the district and among his men, straightforward and sportive, something of the old gay Peter Jäger.

The captain had just been in again in the afternoon and tried the concert pitch on the clavichord, which was constantly lowering, and compared his deep bass with its almost soundless rumbling G, when Jörgen thought he saw, through the window, a movable spot on one of the light bits of the highway, which was visible even on the other side of the lake.

The captain caught up his field-glasses, rushed out on the steps and in again, called to Ma--and afterwards patiently took his post at the open window, while he called Ma in again every time they came into the turns.

Down there it did not go so quickly. Svarten stopped of his own accord at every man he met on the way; and then Great-Ola must explain.

A young lady with a duster tightly fastened about her waist, parasol and gloves, and such a fine brass-bound English trunk on the back of the cariole, was in itself no common thing. But that it was the daughter of the captain at Gilje who was coming home raised the affair up to the sensational, and the news was therefore well spread over the region when, toward evening, the cariole had got as far as the door at home.

There stood mother and father and Jörgen and Thea and the sub-officer, Tronberg, with his small bag yonder at the corner of the house, and the farm-hands and girls inside the passageway--and Great-Ola was cheated out of lifting the young lady down on the steps, for she herself jumped from the cariole step straight into the arms of her father, and then kissed her mother and hugged Thea and pulled Jörgen by the hair a little forced dance around on the stairs, so that he should feel the first impression of her return home.

Yes, it was the parasol she had lost on the steps and which a bare-footed girl came up with; Ma had a careful eye upon it--the costly, delicate, fringed parasol with long ivory handle had been lying there between the steps and the cariole wheel.

The captain took off her duster himself--The hair, the dress, the gloves; that was the way she looked, a fine grown lady from head to foot.

And so they had the Gilje sun in the room!

"I have been sitting and longing all day for the smell of the _petum_ and to see a little cloud of smoke about your head, father--I think you are a little stouter--and then your dress-coat--I always thought of you in the old shiny one. And mother--and mother!" She rushed out after her into the pantry, where she stayed a long time.

Then she came out more quietly.

A hot fire was blazing in the kitchen. There stood Marit, a short, red-cheeked mountain girl, with white teeth and small hands, stirring the porridge so that the sweat dropped from her face; she knew very well that Great-Ola would have it so that fifteen men could dance on the surface, and now she got the help of the young lady. After that Inger-Johanna must over and spin on Torbjörg's spinning-wheel.

The captain only went with her and looked on with half moistened eyes, and when they came in again Inger-Johanna got the bottle from the sideboard, and gave each of them out there a dram in honor of her return.

The supper-table was waiting in the sitting-room on a freshly laid cloth--red mountain trout and her favorite dish, strawberries and cream.

They must not think of waking her, so tired as she was last night, father had said.

And therefore Thea had sat outside of the threshold from half-past six, waiting to hear any noise, so that she could rush in with the tray and little cakes, for Inger-Johanna was to have her coffee in bed.

Jörgen kept her company, taken up with studying the singular lock on her trunk, and then with scanning the light, delicate patent leather shoes. He rubbed them on his forehead and his nose, after having moistened them with his breath.

Now she was waking up in there, and open flew the door for Jörgen, Thea, and Pasop, and afterwards Torbjörg with the cup of coffee.

Yes, she was at home now.

The fragrance of the hay came in through the open window, and she heard them driving the rumbling loads into the barn.

And when she saw, from the window, the long narrow lake in the valley down below, and all the mountain peaks which lifted themselves so precipitously up towards the heavens over the light fog on the other side, she understood some of her mother's feeling that here it was cramped, and that it was two hundred long miles to the city. But then it was so fragrant and beautiful--and then, she was really home at Gilje.

She must go out and lie in the hay, and let Jörgen hold the buck that was inclined to butt, so she could get past, and then look at his workshop and the secret hunting gun he was making out of the barrel and lock of an old army gun.

It was a special confidence to his grown-up sister, for powder and gun were most strictly forbidden him, which did not prevent his having his arsenals of his father's coarse-grained cartridge powder hidden in various places in the hills.

And then she must be with Thea and find out all about the garden, and with her father on his walks here and there; they went up by the cow-path, with its waving ferns, white birch stems, and green leaves, over the whole of the sloping ridge of Gilje.

It was like a happy, almost giddy, intoxication of home-coming for three or four days.

It came to be more like every-day life, when Ma began to talk about this and that of the household affairs and to make Inger-Johanna take part in her different cares and troubles.

What should be done with Jörgen? They must think of having him go to the city soon. Ma had thought a good deal about writing to Aunt Alette and consulting with her. Father must not be frightened about spending too much money. If Aunt Alette should conclude to take him to board, then it wouldn't involve the terrible immediate outlay of money. They could send many kinds of provisions there, butter and cheese, _fladbröd_, dried meat, and bacon as often as there was an opportunity.

She must talk with father about this sometime later in the winter, when she had heard what Aunt Alette thought.

And with Thinka they had gone through a great deal. Ma had had all she could do to keep father out of it--you know how little he can bear annoyances--and she had found it a matter almost of life and death on Wednesdays to intercept Jörgen, when he brought the mail, to get hold of Thinka's letters. This spring Ma had written time after time, and represented to her what kind of a future she was preparing for herself, if she, in weakness and folly, gave way to her rash feelings for this clerk, Aas.

But in the beginning, you see, there came some letters back, which were very melancholy. One could live even in poorer circumstances, she wrote,--it seems that there was a rather doubtful prospect of his getting a situation as a country bailiff that she had set her hopes on.

Ma had placed it seriously before her how such a thing as that might end. Suppose he was sick or died, where would she and perhaps a whole flock of children take refuge?

"It depends on overcoming the first emotion of the fancy. Now she is coming home in the autumn, and it could be wished that she had gotten over her feelings. My brother Birger is so headstrong; but maybe it was for the best that, as my sister-in-law writes, as soon as he got a hint of the state of affairs, he gave Aas his dismissal and sent him packing that very day. The last two or three letters show that Thinka is quieter."

"Thinka is horribly meek," exclaimed Inger-Johanna with flashing eyes. "I believe they could pickle her and put her down and tie up the jar; she would not grumble. If Uncle Birger had done so to me, I would not have stayed there a day longer."

"Inger-Johanna! Inger-Johanna!" Ma shook her head. "You have a dangerous, spoiled temper. It is only the very, very smallest number of us women who are able to do what they would like to."

The captain did not disdain the slightest occasion to bring forward his daughter just come home from the city.

He had turned the time to account, for in the beginning of the next week he would be obliged to go on various surveys up on the common land and then to the drills.

They had made a trip down to the central part of the district, to Pastor Horn's, and on the way stopped and called on Sexton Semmelinge and Bardon Kleven, the bailiff. They had been to Dr. Bauman, the doctor of the district; and now on Sunday they were invited to Sheriff Gülcke's--a journey of thirty-five miles down the valley.

It was an old house of a _calêche_, repaired a hundred times, which was drawn out of its hiding-place, and within whose chained together arms Svarten and the dun horse--the blind bay had long since been sent away--were to continue their three-months-long attempt to agree in the stall.

If the beasts had any conception, it must most likely have been that it was an enormously heavy plough they were drawing, in a lather, up and down hill, with continual stoppings to get breath and let those who were sitting in it get in and out.

If there was anything the captain adhered to, it was military punctuality, and at half-past four in the morning the whole family in full dress, the captain and Jörgen with their pantaloons turned up, the ladies with their dresses tucked up, were wandering on foot down the Gilje hills--they were some of the worst on the whole road--while Great-Ola drove the empty carriage down to the highway.

The dun horse was better fitted for pulling than holding back, so that it was Svarten that must be depended on in the hills, and Great-Ola, the captain, and Jörgen must help.

It was an exceedingly warm day, and the carriage rolled on in an incessant dense, stifling dust of the road about the feet of the horses and the wheels. But then it was mainly down hill, and they rested and got breath every mile.

At half-past one they had only to cross the ferry and a short distance on the other side again up to the sheriff's farm.

On the ferry a little toilet was temporarily made, and the captain took his new uniform coat out of the carriage box and put it on. Except that Jörgen had greased his pantaloons from the wheels, not a single accident had happened on the whole trip.

As soon as they came up on the hill, they saw the judge's carriage roll up before them through the gate, and in the yard they recognized the doctor's cariole and the lawyer's gig. There stood the sheriff himself, helping the judge's wife out of the carriage; his chief clerk and his daughters were on the steps.

So far as the ladies were concerned, there must, of course, be a final toilet and a change of clothes before they found themselves presentable. One of the two daughters of the lawyer was in a red and the other in a clear white dress, and of the three daughters of the judge, two were in white and one in blue.

That a captain's daughter, with his small salary, came in brown silk with patent leather shoes, could only be explained by the special circumstances, suggested Mrs. Scharfenberg in the ear of old Miss Horn of the parsonage; it was, in all probability, one of the governor's lady's, which had been made over down in the city.

The fact was that young Horn who, it was expected, would be chaplain to his father, the minister, treated Inger-Johanna in a much more complimentary manner than he showed toward Mrs. Scharfenberg's daughter, Bine, to whom he was as good as engaged; and the chief clerk did not seem to be blind to her. They both ran to get a chair for her.

The sofa was assigned to the judge's wife and to Ma, as a matter of course. Mrs. Scharfenberg did not think this quite right either, since her husband had been nominated second for the judgeship of Sogn; and that the sheriff had to-day also invited the rich Mrs. Silje was, her husband said, only a bid for popularity: she was still always what she was--widow of the country storekeeper, Silje.

It was a long time to sit and exchange compliments, before the mainstay of the dinner, the sheriff's roast, was sufficiently and thoroughly done, and he got a nod from his wife to ask the company out to the table in the large room.

The only one who laughed and talked before the ice was fairly broken was Inger-Johanna, who chatted with the judge and then with Horn and the army doctor.

Ma pursed her lips a little uneasily, as she sat on the sofa and pretended to be absorbed in conversation with Mrs. Brinkman; she knew what they all would say about her afterwards.

It had been a rather warm dinner. Through the abundant provision of the sheriff, the fatigue and hunger after the journey had given place to an extremely lively mood spiced with speeches and songs.

They had sat a long time at the table before the scraping of the judge's chair finally gave the signal for the breaking up.

The sheriff now stood stout and beaming during the thanks for the meal, and demanded and received his tribute as host--a kiss from each one of the young ladies.

The masculine part of the company distributed themselves with their coffee-cups out in the cool hall and on the stairs, or went with their tobacco pipes into the yard, while the ladies sat around the coffee-table in the parlor.

The judge talked somewhat loudly with the sheriff, and the captain, red and hot, stood a little way out in the yard, cooling himself.

The doctor came up and clapped him on the shoulder. "The sheriff really took the spigot out of the bung to-day: we had excellent drink."

"Oh, if one only had a pipe now, and could go and loaf."

"You have got one in your hand, man."

"Really? But filled, you see."

"You just went in and filled it."

"I? No, really; but a light, you see, a light."

"I say, Jäger, Scharfenberg is already up taking a nap."

"Yes, yes; but the bay, you cheated me shamefully in that."

"Oh, nonsense, Peter; your cribber ate himself half out of my stall--That Madeira was strong."

"Rist--my daughter, Inger-Johanna--"

"Yes, you see, Peter, I forgive you that you are a little cracked about her; she may make stronger heads than yours whirl round."

"She is beautiful--beautiful." His voice was assuming an expression of serious pathos.

The two military men, at a sedate, thoughtful pace, walked back to one of the sleeping-rooms in the second story.

In the hall, tall Buchholtz, the judge's chief clerk, was standing, stiff and silent, against the wall, with his coffee-cup in his hand; he was pondering whether anyone would notice anything wrong about him. He had been in the coffee room with the ladies and tried to open a conversation with Miss Jäger.

"Have you been here long, Miss Jäger?"

"Three weeks."

"How lo-ong do you intend to stay here?"

"Till the end of August."

"Don't you miss the city u-p here?"

"No, not at all."

She turned from him, and began to talk with her mother. The same questions had now been asked her by all the gentlemen.

The irreproachable Candidate Horn stood by the door enjoying his coffee and the defeat of the chief clerk. He was lying in wait for an opportunity to have a chat with Inger-Johanna, but found an insurmountable obstacle in the judge's well-read wife, who began to talk with her about French literature, a region in which he felt he could not assert himself.

At the request of the sheriff, a general exit took place later. The ladies must go out on the porch and see the young people playing "the widower seeking a mate."

Mrs. Silje sat there, broad and good-natured after all the good eating, and enjoyed it.

"No, but he did not catch her this time, no. Make the strap around your waist tighter, next time, sir!" She smiled when the chief clerk's attempt to catch Inger-Johanna failed; "she is such a fine young lady to try for."

Mrs. Scharfenberg found that there was a draught on the stairs, and as she moved into the hall, where the sheriff's wife, always an invalid, sat wrapped up in her shawl, she could not but say to her and the judge's wife that the young lady's reckless manner of running--so that you could even see the stockings above her shoes--smacked rather much of being free. But she was sure Mrs. Silje did not find it in the least unbecoming. She remarked sharply, "She had herself gone so many times on the sunny hillside with the other girls, raking hay in her smock before she was married to the trader."

Ma, indeed, gave Inger-Johanna an anxious hint as soon as she could reach her.

"You must not run so violently, child. It does not look well--you must let yourself be caught."

"By that chief clerk--never!"

Ma sighed.

They kept on with the game till tea time, when those who had been missing after dinner again showed themselves in a rested condition, ready to begin a game of Boston for the evening.

"But Jörgen--where is Jörgen?"

In obedience to the call, somewhat pale and in a cold perspiration, but with a bold front, he came down from the office building, where he had been sitting, smoking tobacco on the sly with the sheriff's clerk and "the execution horse," whose racy designation was due to his unpopular portion of the sheriff's functions.

The game of Boston was continued after supper with violent defeats and quite wonderful exposed hands, between the judge, the captain, the sheriff, and the attorney.

In the other room Ma sat uneasy, wondering when father would think of breaking up--they had a very long journey home, and it was already ten o'clock. The sheriff had urged them in vain to remain all night; but it didn't answer this time; Jäger had definite reasons why they must be home again to-morrow.

She sat in silence, resting her hopes on the sharp little Mrs. Scharfenberg, trusting she would soon dare to show herself in the door of the card room.

But it dragged on; the other ladies were certainly resting their hope on her.

She nodded to Inger-Johanna. "Can't you go in," she whispered, "and remind your father a little of the time--but only as if of your own accord?"

Finally at eleven o'clock they were sitting in the carriage--after the sheriff had again asserted, on the steps, his privilege of an old man towards the young ladies. He was a real master in meeting all the playful ways they had of escaping in order to be saved from the smacking good-by.

The chief clerk and Candidate Horn went with the carriage to the gate.

"It was neither for your sake nor mine, Ma," said the captain.

He was driving, but turned incessantly in order to hear the talk in the carriage, and throw in an observation with it. Jörgen and Thea, who had kept modestly quiet the whole day, but had made many observations, nevertheless, were now on a high horse; Thea especially plumed herself as the only soul who had succeeded in escaping the sheriff.

And now they were on the way home in the light, quiet July night, up hill and up hill--in places down, foot by foot, step by step, except where they dared to let the carriage go faster as they came to the bottom of a hill.

A good level mile or two, where they could all sit in the carriage, was passed over at a gentle jog-trot. It was sultry with a slightly moist fragrance from the hay-cocks, and a slight impression of twilight over the land--Great-Ola yawned, the captain yawned, the horses yawned, Jörgen nodded, Thea slept, wrapped up under Ma's shawl. Now and then they were roused by the rushing of a mountain brook, as it flowed foaming under a bridge in the road.

Inger-Johanna sat dreaming, and at last saw a yellowish brown toad before her, with small, curious eyes and a great mouth--and then it rose up, so puffed up and ungainly, and hopped down towards her.

The horses stopped.

"Oh, I believe I was dreaming about the sheriff!" said Inger-Johanna, as she woke up shivering.

"We must get out here," came sleepily from the captain, "on the Rognerud hills; Ma can stay in with Thea."

The day was beginning to dawn. They saw the sun bathe the mountain tops in gold and the light creep down the slopes. The sun lay as it were still, and peeped at them first, till it at once bounded over the crest in the east like a golden ball, and colored red the wooded mountain sides and hills on the west side, clear down to the greensward shining with dew.

Still they toiled, foot by foot, up the hills.

On the Gilje lands the people had already been a long time at work spreading out the hay, when they saw them coming.

"It is good to be home again," declared Ma. "I wonder if Marit has remembered to hang the trout in the smoke."

Marit came rushing out of the door of the porch: "There was a fine city traveller came this way last night! He who was here two years ago, and had his shoes mended. I did not know anything better than to let him sleep in the blue chamber."

"Oh, ho! Student Grip! I suppose he is on his way towards home."

Ma looked at once at Inger-Johanna; she fell into a reverie. She stepped hurriedly out of the carriage.

"Jäger is going surveying to-morrow a long distance into the mountains,--clear over to the Grönnelid _saeters_," Ma said to him, when he came out of his room in the morning, "and there is so much that must be done."

"So--oh--and to-morrow early." The student hesitated. "My plan is to go home over the mountain, as I did last time--to get a little really fresh air, away from the stuffy town air and the lawbooks."

"But then you could go with Jäger? It will be thirty-five to forty miles you could go together up in the mountains--and for Jäger, it would be a real pleasure to have company. You won't have any objection, I suppose, to my putting up something for you to eat by the way?"

"Thanks--I thank you very much for all your kindness."

"She will not have me, that is plain," he muttered, while he wandered about the yard during the forenoon; they were all asleep except the mistress. But he did not come here to escort the captain.

In the afternoon, when it began to grow a little cool, the captain, Inger-Johanna, Jörgen, and Student Grip took the lonely road to the