little more courage. His
mother was no doubt thinking of her own dancing days, for she sat
singing to the sound of the spinning-wheel, while he dressed himself
and ate his breakfast. Her humming finally made him rise from the
table and go to the window; the same dullness and depression he had
felt before took possession of him now, and he was forced to rouse
himself, and think of work. The weather had changed, there had come a
little frost into the air, so that what yesterday had threatened to
fall in rain, to-day came down as sleet. Oyvind put on his snow-socks,
a fur cap, his sailor's jacket and mittens, said farewell, and started
off, with his axe on his shoulder.

Snow fell slowly, in great, wet flakes; he toiled up over the coasting
hill, in order to turn into the forest on the left. Never before,
winter or summer, had he climbed this hill without recalling something
that made him happy, or to which he was looking forward. Now it was a
dull, weary walk. He slipped in the damp snow, his knees were stiff,
either from the party yesterday or from his low spirits; he felt that
it was all over with the coasting-hill for that year, and with it,
forever. He longed for something different as he threaded his way in
among the tree-trunks, where the snow fell softly. A frightened
ptarmigan screamed and fluttered a few yards away, but everything else
stood as if awaiting a word which never was spoken. But what his
aspirations were, he did not distinctly know, only they concerned
nothing at home, nothing abroad, neither pleasure nor work; but rather
something far above, soaring upward like a song. Soon all became
concentrated in one defined desire, and this was to be confirmed in the
spring, and on that occasion to be number one. His heart beat wildly
as he thought of it, and before he could yet hear his father's axe in
the quivering little trees, this wish throbbed within him with more
intensity than anything he had known in all his life.

His father, as usual, did not have much to say to him; they chopped
away together and both dragged the wood into heaps. Now and then they
chanced to meet, and on one such occasion Oyvind remarked, in a
melancholy tone, "A houseman has to work very hard."

"He as well as others," said the father, as he spit in the palm of his
hand and took up the axe again.

When the tree was felled and the father had drawn it up to the pile,
Oyvind said,--

"If you were a gardman you would