cattle-dealers that came over the mountain, that a longing and
restlessness had taken possession of her.

And then she had gone out to service in the town.

She was about as suitable there as a tumble-down haystack in a handsome
town street, or as a cow on a flight of stairs--that is to say, not at
all.

She used to waste her time on the market-place by all the hay loads. She
must see and feel the hay--_that_ was not at all like mountain grass.
"No indeed! Mountain grass was so soft, and then, how it smelt! Oh dear
no!"

But her mistress had other uses for her servant than letting her spend
the morning talking to hay-cart drivers. So she went from place to
place, each time descending both as regarded wages and mistress. Barbara
was good-natured and honest; but she had one fault--the great one of
being totally unfit for all possible town situations.

Yet Society has, as we know, a wonderful faculty for making use of,
assimilating and reconstructing everything, even the apparently most
meaningless and useless, for its own purpose. And the way it took,
quickly enough, with poor Barbara was that she became the only thing in
which she could be of any service in the town--namely, a nurse.

It was a sad time and a hard struggle while the shame lasted, almost
enough to kill her; and after that, she never thought of returning to
the Heimdal mountains again.

But things were to be still harder.

The various social claims, which an age of progress increasingly lays
upon the lady of the house in the upper classes of society, asserted
themselves here in the town by an ever increasing demand for nurses.

"The reason," as Dr. Schneibel explained, "was simply a law of
Nature--you can't be a milch-cow and an intelligent human being at the
same time. The renovation of blood and nerves must be artificially
conveyed from that class of society which stands nearer to Nature."

And now the thing was to find an extra-healthy, thoroughly strong nurse
for Consul-General Veyergang's two delicate, newly-arrived, little ones.

Dr. Schneibel had very thoughtfully kept a nurse in reserve for Mrs.
Veyergang--"a really remarkable specimen of the original healthiness in
the common stock. One might say--h'm, h'm--that if Mrs. Veyergang could
not get to the mountains, the mountains were so courteous as to come to
her. The girl still had an odour of the cowshed about her perhaps; but
when all's said and done, that was only a stronger assuranc