and now these two brothers
began to talk together. They accounted for everything from the day
they had bid for the watch up to the present moment. Baard concluded
by producing the lump of gold he always carried about him, and it now
became manifest to the brothers that in all these years neither had
known a happy day.

Anders did not say much, for he was not able to do so, but Baard
watched by his bed as long as he was ill.

"Now I am perfectly well," said Anders one morning on waking. "Now, my
brother, we will live long together, and never leave each other, just
as in the old days."

But that day he died.

Baard took charge of the wife and the child, and they fared well from
that time. What the brothers had talked of together by the bed, burst
through the walls and the night, and was soon known to all the people
in the parish, and Baard became the most respected man among them. He
was honored as one who had known great sorrow and found happiness
again, or as one who had been absent for a very long time. Baard grew
inwardly strong through all this friendliness about him; he became a
truly pious man, and wanted to be useful, he said, and so the old
corporal took to teaching school. What he impressed upon the children,
first and last, was love, and he practiced it himself, so that the
children clung to him as to a playmate and father in one.

Such was the history of the school-master, and so deeply did it root
itself in Oyvind's mind that it became both religion and education for
him. The school-master grew to be almost a supernatural being in his
eyes, although he sat there so sociably, grumbling at the scholars.
Not to know every lesson for him was impossible, and if Oyvind got a
smile or a pat on his head after he had recited, he felt warm and happy
for a whole day.

It always made the deepest impression on the children when the old
school-master sometimes before singing made a little speech to them,
and at least once a week read aloud some verses about loving one's
neighbor. When he read the first of those verses, his voice always
trembled, although he had been reading it now some twenty or thirty
years. It ran thus:--

"Love thy neighbor with Christian zeal!
Crush him not with an iron heel,
Though he in dust be prostrated!
Love's all powerful, quickening hand
Guides, forever, with magic wand
All that it has created."

But when he had recited the whole