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
valley which was stretched out below, and she
could see the red roofs of the Blakstad mansion
peeping forth between the fir-trees. And she
wondered what they were doing down there,
whether Grimhild had done milking, and
whether her father had returned from the ford,
where it was his habit at this hour to ride with
the footmen to water the horses. As she sat
thus wondering, she was startled by a creaking
in the dry branches hard by, and lifting her eye,
she saw a tall, rather clumsily built, young man
emerging from the thicket. He had a broad
but low forehead, flaxen hair which hung down
over a pair of dull ox-like eyes; his mouth was
rather large and, as it was half open, displayed
two massive rows of shining white teeth.
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