was a country merchant, and owned the trading-place, ----ven
in West Lofoten. He was really from Trondhjem, whence he had come north,
as a destitute boy, in one of those small vessels which are sent from
that city to Lofoten, to trade during the fishing season. In his youth
he had gone through a great deal, and had even worked for a time in a
boat's crew, as a simple fisherman, until he at last got a place as
shop-boy with Erlandsen the merchant, whose son-in-law he became.

My father, in middle age, was a handsome man, black-haired and
dark-skinned, with sharp, energetic features, and in height rather short
than tall. He always wore a brown duffel, seaman's jacket, and glazed
hat. In manner he was stern, and not very accessible; it was said, too,
that he was rather a hard man--for which the severe school of life
through which he had passed was perhaps to blame. If this manner, on the
one hand, made him few friends, on the other, it gained for him a
greater confidence in business matters, in which he was prompt and
expeditious, always claiming to the utmost what he considered to be his
due. People feared him, and would not willingly be on bad terms with
him.

We have generally only flashing recollections of what has happened
before our eighth year, but these flashes last for a whole lifetime. I
have in my mind just such a picture of my poor unhappy mother. I know
her better from that than from all I have heard about her since; from
what I have been told she must have had fair hair and soft blue eyes,
have been pale and delicate, and in figure rather tall. She was also
very quiet and melancholy.

She was Erlandsen's only daughter, and was married to my father while he
was yet a subordinate in Erlandsen's service, and it was said that it
was the old man who brought about the union, thinking it the best way to
provide for her future.

I remember a warm summer day, and the mowers in their shirt-sleeves,
mowing with long scythes, out in the meadow: I was with my mother, as
she passed by them, knitting. Outside the fence lay a half-bare rocky
hill, behind which my mother had a bench. Above this on a stony heap
grew raspberry-bushes, and beside them stood a few small birch-trees.
While I was scrambling about among the stones, picking raspberries,
father called my mother.

When she had gone away, there came over to me from the other side of the
hill a tall, pale lady, who seemed older than mother, dressed in black,
with a