The Great Hunger

So things went on till winter was far spent. Now that Louise, too, was a wage-earner, and could help with the expenses, they could dine luxuriously at an eating-house every day,...

The two-o’clock bell at the Technical College had just begun to ring, and a stream of students appeared out of the long straggling buildings and poured through the gate, breakin...

A little shaggy, grey-bearded old man stood chopping and sawing in the wood-shed at Loreng. He had been there longer than anyone could remember. One master left, another took hi...

In a narrow alley off Sea Street lived Gorseth the job-master, with a household consisting of a lean and skinny wife, two half-starved horses, and a few ramshackle flies and sle...

When Peer, as quite a little fellow, had been sent to live with the old couple at Troen, he had already passed several times from one adopted home to another, though this he did...

Ringeby lay on the shore of a great lake; and was one of those busy commercial towns which have sprung up in the last fifty years from a nucleus consisting of a saw-mill and a f...

“Hei, Merle; We’re going to have distinguished visitors--where in the world have you got to!” Peer hurried through the rooms with an open telegram in his hand, and at last came...

So Peer stays on and goes fishing. He catches little; but time goes leisurely here, and the summer lies soft and warm over the brown and blue hillsides. He has soon learned that...

I write to tell you of what has lately happened to us here, chiefly in the hope that it may be some comfort to yourself. For I have discovered, dear friend, that this world-sorr...

Some years had passed--a good many years--and once more summer had come, and June. A passenger steamer, bound from Antwerp to Christiania, was ploughing her way one evening over...

A working drawing is a useful thing; an idea in one’s head is all very well. But the men he employed to turn his plans into tangible models worked slowly; why not use his own ha...

Christmas was near, the days were all grey twilight, and there was a frost that set the wall-timbers cracking. The children went about blue with cold. When Merle scrubbed the fl...

For sheer havoc, there is no gale like a good northwester, when it roars in, through the long winter evenings, driving the spindrift before it between the rocky walls of the fjo...

A little road winds in among the woods, two wheel-tracks only, with a carpet of brown pine-needles between; but there are trees and the sky, quiet and peace, so that it’s a real...

When a country boy in blue homespun, with a peaked cap on his blond head, goes wandering at random through the streets of a town, it is no particular concern of any one else. He...

“Good-morning, madam--ah! so this is what you look like in morning dress. Why, morning neglige might have been invented for you, if I may say so. You might be a Ghirlandajo. Or...

There came a card from Peer, with a brief message: “Off to inspect the ground.” A fortnight later he came home, loaded with maps and plans. “Of course I’m late for the fair, as...

Herr Uthoug Junior, Agent for English tweeds, stepped out of the train one warm day in July, and stood for a moment on the station platform looking about him. Magnificent scener...

“Merle, dearest, you don’t imagine that I like going. But you surely don’t want me to have another big breach this year. It would be sheer ruin, I do assure you. Come, come now;...

Some way up from the high-road there stands a little one-storeyed house with three small windows in a row, a cowshed on one side of it and a smithy on the other. When smoke rise...

One day about midsummer it was old Raastad himself that came down to meet the train, driving a spring-cart, with a waggon following behind. Was he expecting visitors? the people...

As evening fell, he saw a multitude of lights spread out on every side far ahead in the darkness. And next, with his little wooden chest on his shoulder, he was finding his way...

One evening in the late autumn Merle was sitting at home waiting for her husband. He had been away for several weeks, so it was only natural that she should make a little festiv...

For the next few years Peer managed his estate and his workshop, without giving too much of his time to either. He had his bailiff and his works-manager, and the work went on we...

He sat in the train on his way up-country, and from the carriage window watched farms and meadows and tree-lined roads slide past. Where was he going? He did not know himself. W...

Legendary being! Cast down from Khedivial heights one day and up again on high with Kitchener the next. But, in Heaven’s name, what has taken you to the Soudan? What made you go...

Old Lorentz D. Uthoug rarely visited his rich sister at Bruseth, but to-day he had taken his weary way up there, and the two masterful old folks sat now facing each other.