f any kind. He pressed her fondly to his heart, and was gone.

"The guests were all assembled to accompany the bridal pair to the
church of Copparberg, where they were to be married, and a crowd of
girls, who were to be the bridesmaids and walk in procession before the
bride (as is the custom of the place), were laughing and playing round
Ulla. The musicians were tuning their instruments to begin a wedding
march. It was almost noon, but Elis had not made his appearance.
Suddenly some miners came running up, horror in their pale faces, with
the news that there had been a terrible catastrophe, a subsidence of
the earth, which had destroyed the whole of Pehrson Dahlsjoe's part of
the mine.

"'Elis! oh, Elis! you are gone!' screamed Ulla, wildly, and fell as if
dead. Then only, for the first time, Dahlsjoe learned from the Captain
that Elis had gone down the main-shaft in the morning. Nobody else had
been in the mine, the rest of the men having been invited to the
wedding. Dahlsjoe and all the others hurried off to search, at the
imminent danger of their own lives. In vain! Elis Froebom was not to be
found. There could be no question that the earth-fall had buried him in
the rock. And thus came desolation and mourning upon the house of brave
Pehrson Dahlsjoe, at the moment when he thought he was assured of peace
and happiness for the remainder of his days.

"Long had stout Pehrson Dahlsjoe been dead, his daughter Ulla long lost
sight of and forgotten. Nobody in Falun remembered them. More than
fifty years had gone by since Froebom's luckless wedding-day, when it
chanced that some miners who were making a connection-passage between
two shafts, found, at a depth of three hundred yards, buried in
vitriolated water, the body of a young miner, which seemed, when they
brought it to the daylight, to be turned to stone.

"The young man looked as if he were lying in a deep sleep, so perfectly
preserved were the features of his lace, so wholly without trace of
decay his new suit of miner's clothes, and even the flowers in his
breast. The people of the neighbourhood all collected round the young
man, but no one recognized him or could say who he had been, and none
of the workmen missed any comrade.

"The body was going to be taken to Falun, when out of the distance an
old, old woman came creeping slowly and painfully up on crutches.

"Here's the old St. John's Day grandmother!' the miners said. They had
given her this name bec