father's home and little bit of land far up on the mountain-side; and,
strangely enough, not till then did he marry. He had several children,
among them a boy called Hans, who seemed to have inherited his
grandfather's gifts--not exactly in the way of fiddle-playing, though
he did play--but he sang the old songs beautifully and made new ones
himself. People's appreciation of his songs was not a little added to
by the fact that so few knew himself; there were not many that had
even seen him. His old father had been a hunter, and while the boys
were quite small, the old man took them out to the hillside and taught
them to load and aim a gun. They always remembered how pleased he was
when they were able to earn enough with their shooting to pay for
their own powder and shot. He did not live long after this, and soon
after his death their mother died too, and the children were left to
take care of themselves, which they managed to do. The boys hunted and
the girls looked after the little hill farm. People turned to look at
them when they once in a way showed themselves in the valley; they
were so seldom there. It was a long, bad road down. In winter they
occasionally came to sell or send off the produce of their hunting; in
summer they were busy with the strangers. Their little holding was the
highest lying in the district, and it became famed for having that
pure mountain air which cures people suffering from their lungs or
nerves, better than any yet discovered medicine; every year they had
as many summer visitors, from town, and even from abroad, as they
could accommodate. They added several rooms to their house, and still
it was always full. So these brothers and sisters, from being poor,
very poor, came to be quite well-to-do. Intercourse with so many
strangers had made them a little different from the other country
people--they even knew something of foreign languages. Hans was now
twenty-seven. Some years before he had bought up his brothers' and
sisters' shares, so that the whole place belonged to him.