forth he was obliged to sing for them constantly.
These foreign melodies of his fluttering thither from a fuller, richer
life, freer conditions, larger ideas than their own, clung to Magnhild's
fancy the entire summer. They were the first pictures which had awakened
actual yearning within her breast. It may also be said that for the
first time she comprehended what song was. As she was singing her
interminable scales one day, before beginning her studies in singing
from note, she came to a full realization of the fact that this song
without melody was to her like wings beating against a cage: it
fluttered up and down against walls, windows, doors, in perpetual and
fruitless longing, aye, until at last it sank like the cobwebs, over
everything in the room. She could sit alone out of doors with _his_
songs. While she was humming them, the forest hues dissolved into one
picture; and that she had never discovered before. The density, the
vigor in the tree-tops, above and below the tree-tops, over the entire
mountain wall, as it were, overwhelmed her; the rushing of the waters of
the stream attracted her.

The second thing which had made so deep an impression on her, and which
was blended with all the rest, was Skarlie's story of how he had become
lame. In America, when he was a young man, he had undertaken to carry a
boy twelve years old from a burning house; he had fallen with the boy
beneath the ruins. Both were extricated, Skarlie with a crushed limb,
the boy unscathed. That boy was now one of the most noted men of
America.

It was his lot to be saved, "he was destined to something."

This reminder again! The thought of her own fate had heretofore been
shrouded in the wintry mantle of the churchyard, amid frost, weeping,
and harsh clanging of bells; it had been something sombre. Now it
flitted onward to large cities beyond the seas, among ships, burning
houses, songs, and great destinies. From this time forth she dreamed of
what she was destined to be as something far distant and great.

CHAPTER III.

Late in the autumn all three girls were confirmed. This was such a
matter of course to them all that their thoughts were chiefly busied
with what they should wear on the day of the ceremony. Magnhild, who had
never yet had a garment cut out and made expressly for herself, wondered
whether an outfit would now be prepared for her. No. The younger girls
were furnished with new silk dresses; an old black dress that