Page:Christmas Fireside Stories.djvu/172

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160 Legends of the Mill. " But the tailor laid himself down in the ring and slept till the siin; fihone far into the mill Then he rose, locked up the mill, and went up to the farm. "When he came in both the farmer and his wife were still in bed.* for it was Whitsunday morning. " ' Good morning,' såld tjie tailor, and shook hands with the faroQer. "*Good morning,' said the farmer, who, as you may guess, was both glad and surprised to see the tailor safe back again. "'Good morning, mother,' said the tailor, and offered the gude wife his hand. " ' Good morning,' said the wife ; but she was so pale, and looked so queer and confused, and kept her right hand under the bed clothes. At last she offered the tailor her left hand. The tailor then guessed how matters stood, but what he said to the husband, and how it fared with the wife after that, I never heard." " The farmer's wife must have been a witch then ? " asked the; lad, who had been listening intently. " Yes, of course she was," said the old man. We could scarcely hear each other's voices any longer ; the saw was again hard at work and making a terrible noise. The moon had now risen. I felt refreshed after the short rest, and bade the old man farewell and started for town in company with the scared lad, following the footpath below the Grefsen hill. A white m.st floated over the course of the river and the marshes in the valley below. Above the smoky veil over the town rose Akerhus fort, with its towers standing out in sharp relief against the mirror of the fjord, beyond where the Nces point loomed as a black shadow. The sky was almost cloudless. Scarcely any draught could be noticed in the air. The light of the moon was blended with the gloaming of the summer night and softened the outlines of the landscape in the foreground, which lay before us. But the distant fjord lay bathed in the bright and beaming moonlight, while the Asker and Bærum hills loomed high up in the sky and formed the distant fra me of the picture. Refreshed by thcir cooling bath of evening dew, the violets and