n.

THE INGMAR FARM

It was the day after the meeting of the Hellgumists, and a
Saturday. A blizzard was raging. The pastor, who had been called to
the bedside of a sick person who lived way up at the north end of
the great forest, was driving homeward late in the evening under
great difficulties. His horse sank deep in the snowdrifts, and the
sledge was time after time on the point of being upset. Both the
pastor and his hired man were continually getting out to kick away
the snow for a path. Happily it was not very dark. The moon came
rolling out from behind the snow clouds, big and full, shedding its
silvery light upon the ground. Glancing upward, the pastor noticed
that the air was thick with whirling and flying snowflakes.

In some places they made their way quite easily. There were short
stretches of road where the flying snow had not settled, and others
where the snow was deep, but loose and even. The really troublesome
thing was trying to get over the ground where the drifts were piled
so high that one could not even look over them, and where they were
obliged to turn from the road, and to drive across fields and
hedges, at the risk of being dumped into a ditch or having the
horse spiked on a fence rail.

Both the pastor and his servant spoke with much concern of the
drift which always, after a heavy snow, was banked against a high
boarding close to the Ingmar Farm. "If we can only clear that we
are as good as at home," they said.

The pastor remembered how often he had asked Big Ingmar to remove
the high boarding that was the cause of so much snow drifting
toward that particular spot. But nothing had ever been done about
it. Even though everything else on the Ingmar Farm had undergone
changes, certainly those old boards were never disturbed.

At last they were within sight of the farm. And, sure enough, there
was the snowdrift in its usual place, as high as a wall and as hard
as a rock! Here there was no possibility of their turning to one
side; they had no choice but to drive right over it. The thing
looked impossible, so the servant asked whether he hadn't better go
down to the farm and get some help. But to this the pastor would
not consent. He had not exchanged a word with either Karin or
Halvor in upward of five years, and the thought of meeting old
friends with whom one is no longer on speaking terms, was no more
pleasant to him than it is to most people.

So up the drift the horse had to mo