rvives!

But then it is that Inger speaks up, a little timidly, again; seeing,
no doubt, what is troubling him: "What if we both hang on the stick
there?" And the thing she calls a stick is the lever, nothing else.

"No!" cries Isak furiously. But after a moment's thought he says:
"Well, well, since you're here--though you might as well have gone
home. Let's try."

And they get the stone up on edge. Ay, they manage that. And "Puh!"
says Isak.

But now comes a revelation, a strange thing to see. The underside of
the stone is flat, mightily broad, finely cut, smooth and even as
a floor. The stone is but the half of a stone, the other half is
somewhere close by, no doubt. Isak knows well enough that two halves
of the same stone may lie in different places; the frost, no doubt,
that in course of time had shifted them apart. But he is all wonder
and delight at the find; 'tis a useful stone of the best, a door-slab.
A round sum of money would not have filled this fieldworker's mind
with such content. "A fine door-slab," says he proudly.

And Inger, simple creature: "Why! Now how on earth could you tell that
beforehand?"

"H'm," says Isak. "Think I'd go here digging about for nothing?"

They walk home together, Isak enjoying new admiration on false
pretences; 'twas something he had not deserved, but it tasted but
little different from the real thing. He lets it be understood that he
has been looking out for a suitable door-slab for a long time, and had
found it at last. After that, of course, there could be nothing in the
least suspicious about his working there again; he could root about as
much as he pleased on pretext of looking for the other half. And when
Sivert came home, he could get him to help.

But if it had come to this, that he could no longer go out alone and
heave up a stone, why, things were sorely changed; ay, 'twas a bad
look-out, and the more need to get that site cleared quick as might
be. Age was upon him, he was ripening for the chimney-corner. The
triumph he had stolen in the matter of the door-slab faded away in a
few days; 'twas a false thing, and not made to last. Isak stooped a
little now in his walk.

Had he not once been so much of a man that he grew wakeful and
attentive in a moment if one but said a word of stone, a word of
digging? And 'twas no long time since, but a few years, no more. Ay,
and in those days, folk that were shy of a bit of draining work kept
out of his way. Now he was