t, solitude! help me that I may be whole once more
and fit to work, for this is the one and only religion left me to cling
to."

High above, over the two mountain ranges, a blue flood stands immovable,
and in its depths eternal rest is brooding. But is there a will there
too, that is concerned with men on earth? You do not believe in it, and
yet a little prayer mounts up to it as well! Help me--thou too. Who?
Thou that hearest. If Thou care at all for the miserable things called
men that crawl upon the earth--help me! If I once prayed for a great
work that could stay my hunger for things eternal, I repent me now
and confess that it was pride and vanity. Make me a slave, toiling at
servile tasks for food, so that Merle and the children be not taken from
me. Hearest Thou?

Does anyone in heaven find comfort in seeing men tortured by blind
fortune? Are my wife and my children slaves of an unmeaning chance--and
yet can smile and laugh? Answer me, if Thou hearest--Thou of the many
names.

A grasshopper is shrilling in the grass about him. Suddenly he starts up
sitting. A railway-train goes screaming past below.

And so the days go on.

Each morning Merle would steal a glance at her husband's face, to see
if he had slept; if his eyes were dull, or inflamed, or calm. Surely he
must be better soon! Surely their stay here must do him good. She
too had lost faith in medicines, but this air, the country life, the
solitude--rest, rest--surely there must soon be some sign that these
were helping him.

Many a time she rose in the morning without having closed her eyes all
night. But there were the children to look after, the house to see to,
and she had made up her mind to get on without a maid if she possibly
could.

"What has taken you over to the farm so much lately?" she asked one day.
"You have been sitting over there with old Raastad for hours together."

"I--I go over to amuse myself and pass the time," he said.

"Do you talk politics?"

"No--we play cards. Why do you look at me like that?"

"You never cared for cards before."

"No; but what the devil am I to do? I can't read, because of these
cursed eyes of mine--and the hammering in my head. . . . And I've
counted all the farms up and down the valley now. There are fifty in
all. And on the farm here there are just twenty-one houses, big and
little. What the devil am I to take to next?"

Merle sighed. "It is hard," she said. "But couldn't you wait till the
e