Says Inger:  “I wish Oline could have seen all this when she was here.”

Just like a woman!  Sheer senseless vanity—­as if that mattered!  Isak sniffed contemptuously.  Though perhaps he himself would not have been displeased if Oline had been there to see.

The child was crying.

“Go in and look after the boy,” said Isak.  “I’ll look to the horse.”

He takes out the horse and leads it into the stable:  ay, here is Isak putting his horse into the stable.  Feeds it and strokes it and treats it tenderly.  And how much was owing now, on that horse and cart?—­Everything, the whole sum, a mighty debt; but it should all be paid that summer, never fear.  He had stacks of cordwood to pay with, and some building bark from last year’s cut, not to speak of heavy timber.  There was time enough.  But later on, when the pride and glory had cooled off a little, there were bitter hours of fear and anxiety; all depended on the summer and the crops; how the year turned out.

The days now were occupied in field work and more field work; he cleared new bits of ground, getting out roots and stones; ploughing, manuring, harrowing, working with pick and spade, breaking lumps of soil and crumbling them with hand and heel; a tiller of the ground always, laying out fields like velvet carpets.  He waited a couple of days longer—­there was a look of rain about—­and then he sowed his corn.

For generations back, into forgotten time, his fathers before him had sowed corn; solemnly, on a still, calm evening, best with a gentle fall of warm and misty rain, soon after the grey goose flight.  Potatoes were a new thing, nothing mystic, nothing religious; women and children could plant them—­earth-apples that came from foreign parts, like coffee; fine rich food, but much like swedes and mangolds.  Corn was nothing less than bread; corn or no corn meant life or death.

Isak walked bareheaded, in Jesu name, a sower.  Like a tree-stump with hands to look at, but in his heart like a child.  Every cast was made with care, in a spirit of kindly resignation.  Look! the tiny grains that are to take life and grow, shoot up into ears, and give more corn again; so it is throughout all the earth where corn is sown.  Palestine, America, the valleys of Norway itself—­a great wide world, and here is Isak, a tiny speck in the midst of it all, a sower.  Little showers of corn flung out fanwise from his hand; a kindly clouded sky, with a promise of the faintest little misty rain.

Chapter IV

It was the slack time between the seasons, but the woman Oline did not come.

Isak was free of the soil now; he had two scythes and two rakes ready for the haymaking; he made long bottom boards for the cart for getting in the hay, and procured a couple of runners and some suitable wood to make a sledge for the winter.  Many useful things he did.  Even to shelves.  He set up a pair of shelves inside the house, as an excellent place to keep various things, such as an almanac—­he had bought one at last—­and ladles and vessels not in use.  Inger thought a deal of those two shelves.