What was that about potatoes?  Were they just a thing from foreign parts, like coffee; a luxury, an extra?  Oh, the potato is a lordly fruit; drought or downpour, it grows and grows all the same.  It laughs at the weather, and will stand anything; only deal kindly with it, and it yields fifteen-fold again.  Not the blood of a grape, but the flesh of a chestnut, to be boiled or roasted, used in every way.  A man may lack corn to make bread, but give him potatoes and he will not starve.  Roast them in the embers, and there is supper; boil them in water, and there’s a breakfast ready.  As for meat, it’s little is needed beside.  Potatoes can be served with what you please; a dish of milk, a herring, is enough.  The rich eat them with butter; poor folk manage with a tiny pinch of salt.  Isak could make a feast of them on Sundays, with a mess of cream from Goldenhorns’ milk.  Poor despised potato—­a blessed thing!

But now—­things look black even for the potato crop.

Isak looked at the sky unnumbered times in the day.  And the sky was blue.  Many an evening it looked as if a shower were coming.  Isak would go in and say, “Like as not we’ll be getting that rain after all.”  And a couple of hours later all would be as hopeless as before.

The drought had lasted seven weeks now, and the heat was serious; the potatoes stood all the time in flower; flowering marvellously, unnaturally.  The cornfields looked from a distance as if under snow.  Where was it all to end?  The almanac said nothing—­almanacs nowadays were not what they used to be; an almanac now was no good at all.  Now it looked like rain again, and Isak went in to Inger:  “We’ll have rain this night, God willing.”

“Is it looking that way?”

“Ay.  And the horse is shivering a bit, like they will.”

Inger glanced towards the door and said, “Ay, you see, ’twill come right enough.”

A few drops fell.  Hours passed, they had their supper, and when Isak went out in the night to look, the sky was blue.

“Well, well,” said Inger; “anyway, ’twill give the last bit of lichen another day to dry,” said she to comfort him all she could.

Isak had been getting lichen, as much as he could, and had a fine lot, all of the best.  It was good fodder, and he treated it as he would hay, covering it over with bark in the woods.  There was only a little still left out, and now, when Inger spoke of it, he answered despairingly, as if it were all one, “I’ll not take it in if it is dry.”

“Isak, you don’t mean it!” said Inger.

And next day, sure enough, he did not take it in.  He left it out and never touched it, just as he had said.  Let it stay where it was, there’d be no rain anyway; let it stay where it was in God’s name!  He could take it in some time before Christmas, if so be as the sun hadn’t burnt it all up to nothing.