m, as if he had
been endowed with higher powers peculiar to himself; and as he was a
gloomy, meditative man, without wife or child--with no regular home,
indeed--and very seldom came up to the surface, it couldn't fail that a
story soon went about that he was in compact with the mysterious power
which dwells in the bowels of the earth, and fuses the metals.
Disregarding Torbern's solemn warnings--for he always prophesied that
some calamity would happen as soon as the miners' impulse to work
ceased to be sincere love for the marvellous metals and ores--people
went on enlarging the excavations more and more for the sake of mere
profit, till, on St. John's Day of the year 1678, came the terrible
landslip and subsidence which formed our present enormous main-shaft,
laying waste the whole of the works, as they were then, in the process.
It was only after many months' labour that several of the shafts were,
with much difficulty, got into workable order again. Nothing was seen
or heard of Torbern. There seemed to be no doubt that he had been at
work down below at the time of the catastrophe, so that there could be
no question what his fate had been. But not long after, and
particularly when the work was beginning to go on better again, the
miners said they had seen old Torbern in the mine, and that he had
given them valuable advice, and pointed out rich lodes to them. Others
had come across him at the top of the main-shaft, walking round it,
sometimes lamenting, sometimes shouting in wild anger. Other young
fellows have come here in the way you yourself did, saying that an old
miner had advised them to take to mining, and shewn them the way to
Falun. This always happened when there was a scarcity of hands; very
likely it was Torbern's way of helping on the cause. But if it really
was he whom you had those words with in the mine, and if he spoke of a
fine run of trap, there isn't a doubt that there must be a grand vein
of ore thereabouts, and we must see, to-morrow, if we can come across
it. Of course you remember that we call rich veins of the kind
"trap-runs," and that a "Trumm" is a vein which goes sub-dividing into
several smaller ones, and probably gets lost altogether.'

"When Elis, tossed hither and thither by various thoughts, went into
Pehrson Dahlsjoe's, Ulla did not come meeting him as usual. She was
sitting with downcast looks, and--as he thought--eyes which had been
weeping; and beside her was a handsome young fell