In the middle of June, Brita went to the saeter[6]
with the cattle; and her sister, Grimhild,
remained at home to keep house on the farm. She
loved the life in the mountains; the great
solitude sometimes made her feel sad, but it was
not an unpleasant sadness, it was rather a gentle
toning down of all the shrill and noisy feelings
of the soul. Up there, in the heart of the
primeval forest, her whole being seemed to herself
a symphony of melodious whispers with a
vague delicious sense of remoteness and mystery
in them, which she only felt and did not attempt
to explain. There, those weird legends which,
in former days, still held their sway in the fancy
of every Norsewoman, breathed their secrets
into her ear, and she felt her nearness and kinship
to nature, as at no other time.


[6] The saeter is a place in the mountains where the
Norwegian peasants spend their summers pasturing their cattle.
Every large farm has its own saeter, consisting of one
or more chalets, hedged in by a fence of stone or planks.


One night, as the sun was low, and a purple
bluish smoke hung like a thin veil over the tops
of the forest, Brita had taken out her knitting
and seated herself on a large moss-grown stone,
on the croft. Her eyes wandered over the broad