VOL. 105

T

HE dim, blue twilight had already fallen upon the countryside, and when the bell at Lindegaard rang to call the workers home to supper, its sound rose and fell like an angelus over fiord and mountain. The farm laborers out on the wide, golden corn-fields stood erect, and, taking their dinner-tin in one hand and their sickle in the other, set out in companies for their homes, with the red light from the glowing clouds lying above the snow-mountains in the west reflected in their faces.

Lindegaard stood upon a hill, like an old castle. The windows in the great white house were aflame with the rays of the setting sun; the garden and grounds extended almost to the water, and in the background lay the numerous red-painted farm-buildings, constituting almost a little town by themselves. It was as though this large farm had pushed the others away toward the outskirts of the district, either eastward toward the wooded slopes, where the small farms clung to the hillside, or northward to the

bare mountains facing the sea. And when the bell at Lindegaard rang, the bells from the other farms all over the country-side chimed in.

The farm laborers lived in the little fishermen's cottages down by the steel-gray fiord, each with a small piece of land about it. They were pledged to work many weeks of the year on the big farm, and cultivated their own land when they came home in the evening, and even then they had to resort to the sea for their principal means of subsistence. They took part in the herring fisheries in the autumn, and in the winter sailed hundreds of miles in open boats up to Lofoten, perhaps tempted by the hope of gain, but perhaps, too, because on the sea they were free men.

This evening a single worker still remained on one of the large barleyfields, looking, from Lindegaard, only like a black speck in all the yellow; but it was a woman, Màrya Myran, the wife of one of the farm laborers. Cutting the corn on the big farm was a duty, and though Màrya had done

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twice an ordinary day's work, she wanted to finish the last little bit before she went home; but she dreaded having to stand erect, for she was ready to drop with fatigue.

The sickle glittered as she cut, and with red, swollen hands she drew the damp corn toward a skirt that was long since wet through. There was grace in every moment of the slender figure in the gray dress. The black kerchief on her head kept slipping back, and every time she pulled it forward again with the hand that held the sickle. She had scarcely eaten anything since morning, and now it was not only her back that .ed, but her breasts, too, were heavy.

On a heap of straw near her lay what looked like a bundle of clothes, but every now and then it moved and talked. Now it had begun to make little whimpering sounds, too, and the reaper said to herself, "He 's hungry, but he'll have to wait."

The little one had kicked off the clothes his mother had spread over him, and now he stretched a fat little leg into the air and tried to get hold of his toes. There may be a good deal to say about such a proceeding, so he talked all the time, saying, "Do-do-do!" and "Ta-ta-ta!" but he was nevertheless very near crying. In the meantime both legs had become uncovered and began to feel cold; so why should he not set up a scream that his mother could not help hearing? But the sickle sang on without ceasing. The baby whimpered a little, and now and then sucked a thumb and looked up into the sky. On one side the clouds were dark and ugly, but farther off they were red and smiling; and above hung the deep blue of the sky, in which tiny lights began to twinkle.

He tried to talk to these lights, and said, "Ta-ta!" and "Ba-ba!" and then he stretched out a fat little hand and tried to seize some of them, but could not reach far enough. Then he tried to sit up in order to get nearer to them, but only sank deeper into the straw, and an ear of corn fell right across his face. The little fat hand managed to grasp the ear and fling it aside, but the entire expression of the baby face was one of rage. It is allowable to be overwhelmed by one's own misfortune, and he gave vent to a wailing scream. But his mother went on reaping. She was dreading having to stand erect when she had finished.

The baby grew quiet once more. His eyes widened, but he did not know that the stars up there were reflected in them. A semicircle of gold had risen from behind the dark hills in the east. It was so very, very bright, and once more he stretched out his hands. He forgot that his legs were cold, and stretched them up, too; it was as if his whole little body were ready to fly up there and play. At last the semicircle seemed to have a face like grandmother's, and when the baby was sure of this, he began to laugh.

Now his mother set up the last sheaf, and, with one hand on her back and the other over her eyes, straightened herself. She staggered a little, and then walked with uncertain steps to the heap of straw on which her baby lay, and, taking him up, seated herself to nurse him. She sank farther and farther into the soft straw, while the sheaves supported her back; and her baby forgot both the moon and the clouds as she held him to her warm breast.

"Poor little fellow!" she murmured, trying to smile down at him; but every now and again her eyelids closed.

The moon above the eastern hills had turned a silvery white, and the dewy fields sparkled in its light, while the air was filled with the scent of ripe corn and damp earth; but the weary woman, sitting there alone, only wished that some one could carry her home. Now, as she nursed her baby, her own hunger seemed to become greater and her back to ache more; but she wrapped the woolen shawl more closely about the little one, and raised her eyes to rest them on the peaceful landscape before her: the fertile country-side in the blue evening twilight, with light upon light shining out from the farms around; the corn-field in which she sat; the dark, forest-clad hills that she loved. It was a relief to her that the sounds and odors of the sea did not reach her here.

She had passed the seventeen years of her married life on the coast, but had lived her earlier life in a valley, among forests and mountains, and was how as little reconciled to her life by the sea as she had been on the first day of it. She no longer made any complaint, but tried to do the work of two in order to keep morbid thoughts out of her mind. Her husband, Kristàver Myran, was still the handsomest man Gin the district, but he was out on the sea the greater part of the year, chaining her to a life on the wild, barren shore, and filling her with such fear and unrest during the long winter nights that it was all she could do to restrain her impulse to flee from it all. For him and their six children the gray cottage out there was home, but it would never be hers. She was as homesick

now as she had been all through the first year of her married life; she might do the work of two or three, but she never succeeded in working herself into a feeling of home.

The sea, with its terrible, howling storms that raged all through the winter, the waves that day and night thundered and foamed upon the sand and seaweed, foamed, too, in her mind and made her sleepless, and would one day, she felt, rob her of her reason.

They were long, long years. She looked forward to the day when Kristàver would sell his boats and house, move with her and the children up into the valley, and take to farming. They could never be worse off than they were now. Every winter he risked his life upon the Lofoten Sea, and if one year the fishing was good, it was eaten up by the seven bad years, and they were always in poverty. But to hope to draw him from the sea to the land was like trying to change a fish into a bird, and he turned the children's minds in his direction. The eldest boy, Lars, was only sixteen, but he wanted to go to Lofoten next winter; and Oluf, who was fourteen in the spring, talked of nothing else. She was like a hen with a brood of ducklings, vainly calling and enticing them away from the water.

After a time she rose, and, binding the baby firmly to her back with the shawl, set off with a tin can in one hand and her sickle in the other. Before her lay the wide field, and the stubble rustled under her feet as she walked; her long shadow kept pace by her side, and behind her was left a dark trail through the moon-whitened dew. Her kerchief had again slipped back, and her pale face looked still paler in the moonlight. The knowl

edge that the day's work is done, and the walking over a level corn-field with a baby on one's back, give an easier carriage to a woman, even if she is tired. As she passed the cluster of buildings at Lindegaard, there were lights behind white curtains in a long row of windows. She could hear the tones of a piano, and over the high garden-walls floated the fragrant scent of apples and all kinds of flowers. Within those windows people lived a brighter, safer existence than a fisherman can ever attain to.

Then began the barren peat-bog, with its pools of stagnant water, which she always dreaded in the dark. Before her lay the wide fiord, overshadowed by the western mountains and crossed by a broad path of moonlight in which the waves rose and fell unceasingly. Down on the beach lay the fishermen's cottages, with lights in their windows, and the smell of peatsmoke began as usual to make her feel sick.

She could hear the waves now. Shwee-e-e-hoosh-sh-sh! shwee-e-ehoosh-sh-sh! It was as though the sea were always mad and foaming at the mouth, and when she was very tired she felt almost as if she must do the

same.

There was an odor of rotting seaweed in the air, of salt sand, of fish, of tarred boats, and of wet nets hung up to dry-an atmosphere in which she always had a headache and coughed and had a difficulty in breathing. There was a light in a window in Myran, the little home by the sea, and she covered her eyes with her hand; for it was hard that those whom she loved should live in a place that she detested.

The baby on her back was asleep, notwithstanding that his little head

in its hood nodded this way and that at every step. Now she discovered. however, that the two cows and the four sheep were still tethered in the field. Here was more work for her to do, and once more she put her hand over her eyes as if in a feeling of dizziness.

A pleasant warmth met her as she opened the door and entered. A tallow candle was burning on the table, a clock in a brightly painted case ticked on the south wall, against which stood a broad bed, and a similar bed stood against the west wall. A spinning-wheel and a loom took up a good deal of the floor-space, and on the two window-sills stood pots of red geraniums. Three children jumped up from the floor, where they were playing, and ran toward her with cries of "Mother! Mother!" and hanging on to her skirt, and all talking at once, they told her that grandmother had come on a visit.

The bedroom door opened, and an old woman with a pock-marked face, a big nose, and hollow cheeks came out. It was Kari Myran, Màrya's motherin-law, who lived in the house.

"You 're late," she said, looking at Màrya through her spectacles. "Oh, yes; it is late."

The face of another old woman appeared behind the first, with smaller features and a bristly chin. This was Màrya's own mother, Lava Rootawsen, who had come down from the valley on a visit.

"Good evening," she said, coming forward and shaking hands when Màrya had laid the baby in the cradle.

"Good evening, Mother. So you've come all this way, have you?"

The two grandmothers could sit all

day boiling coffee on the stove in the bedroom, and talking of things new and old, and of their rheumatism and the pains in their chest, but in all other respects they were as different as night and day. The old woman at Myran was accustomed to look to the sea and to Providence for everything, and therefore she would often sit with her hands in her lap, seeing things that others could not see. Was it the sea or Providence that she saw? The other grandmother was accustomed to the daily toil up in the valley. She had brought up five children on a small mountain farm, and she held that by picking cranberries or making birch-brooms; but if you relied only on Providence and wind and weather, both your pocket and the larder would be empty.

Marya noticed that there was no supper prepared. The two old women had probably had so much to talk about that they had quite forgotten both her and the cows.

"Where are Lars and Oluf?" she asked.

"They went to fetch peat," said her mother-in-law. "It 's odd that they are n't back yet."

Màrya sighed, and, after saying a few words to her mother, had to go out to put the animals in the cow-shed.

Outside the north wind had risen, and from the beach came the perpetual sound of the waves. It was as though they are plotting some evil in the darkness. Shwee-e-e-hoosh-sh

sh! shwee-e-e-hoosh-sh-sh!

uneven and halting. The front view of the man showed a broad-shouldered body, and a small, weather-beaten face surrounded by a quantity of black hair and beard, and surmounted by a red, pointed woolen cap, with its tassel dangling down over one ear. Some little boys burning seaweed on the beach could see him from behind, however, and he had legs as well, one shorter than the other. He seemed to be sailing in a rough sea, and if it had only been winter, the broad back of his waistcoat would have made a splendid target for a snowball, or a still broader and better would have been the seat of his trousers, with his knife in its sheath hanging from the waistband. waistband. It was all awry, and the patches, one above another, put one in mind of little fields. The trouserslegs lay in folds, like a concertina, and hung down over the tabs of his high boots.

"Hullo, Jacob! Hullo, Damnitallwith-the-limp!"

"Be quiet, boys!" was all he said, and passed on with his barrow.

It was in fact Jacob, and the nickname had been given him because he so often said, "Damn it all!" when he swore, and when he said it, he generally swung out his short leg; but the little boys looked up to him because he was the head-man on the big Lofoten boat, the Sea-Flower, and had gone through so much both on the sea and on land that it was a miracle that he still lived. When a lad had taken hire with him for a Lofoten voyage, the lad's mother would cross herself in horror at the thought that he could go with Jacob. Jacob was a great seaman, a great fisherman, and a great drinker; and while the other seamen lived in the gray cottages round the