without measure.  Listen to me, Sivert:  you be content!  You’ve everything to live on, everything to live for, everything to believe in; being born and bringing forth, you are the needful on earth.  ’Tis not all that are so, but you are so; needful on earth.  ’Tis you that maintain life.  Generation to generation, breeding ever anew; and when you die, the new stock goes on.  That’s the meaning of eternal life.  What do you get out of it?  An existence innocently and properly set towards all.  What you get out of it?  Nothing can put you under orders and lord it over you Sellanraa folk, you’ve peace and authority and this great kindliness all round.  That’s what you get for it.  You lie at a mother’s breast and suck, and play with a mother’s warm hand.  There’s your father now, he’s one of the two-and-thirty thousand.  What’s to be said of many another?  I’m something, I’m the fog, as it were, here and there, floating around, sometimes coming like rain on dry ground.  But the others?  There’s my son, the lightning that’s nothing in itself, a flash of barrenness; he can act.

“My son, ay, he’s the modern type, a man of our time; he believes honestly enough all the age has taught him, all the Jew and the Yankee have taught him; I shake my head at it all.  But there’s nothing mythical about me; ’tis only in the family, so to speak, that I’m like a fog.  Sit there shaking my head.  Tell the truth—­I’ve not the power of doing things and not regretting it.  If I had, I could be lightning myself.  Now I’m a fog.”

Suddenly Geissler seems to recollect himself, and asks:  “Got up that hayloft yet, above the cowshed?”

“Ay, that’s done.  And father’s put up a new house.”

“New house?”

“’Tis in case any one should come, he says—­in case Geissler he should happen to come along.”

Geissler thinks over this, and takes his decision:  “Well, then, I’d better come.  Yes, I’ll come; you can tell your father that.  But I’ve a heap of things to look to.  Came up here and told the engineer to let his people in Sweden know I was ready to buy.  And we’d see what happened.  All the same to me, no hurry.  You ought to have seen that engineer—­here he’s been going about and keeping it all up with men and horses and money and machines and any amount of fuss; thought it was all right, knew no better.  The more bits of stone he can turn into money, the better; he thinks he’s doing something clever and deserving, bringing money to the place, to the country, and everything nearing disaster more and more, and he’s none the wiser.  ’Tis not money the country wants, there’s more than enough of it already; ’tis men like your father there’s not enough of.  Ay, turning the means to an end in itself and being proud of it!  They’re mad, diseased; they don’t work, they know nothing of the plough, only the dice.  Mighty deserving of them, isn’t it, working and wasting themselves to nothing in their own mad way.  Look at them—­staking