“Here’s your food,” said Inger.

Chapter V

One bad year never comes alone.  Isak had grown patient, and took what fell to his lot.  The corn was parched, and the hay was poor, but the potatoes looked like pulling through once more—­bad enough, all things together, but not the worst.  Isak had still a season’s yield of cordwood and timber to sell in the village, and the herring fishery had been rich all round the coast, so there was plenty of money to buy wood.  Indeed, it almost looked like a providence that the corn harvest had failed—­for how could he have threshed it without a barn and threshing-floor?  Call it providence; there’s no harm in that sometimes.

There were other things not so easily put out of mind.  What was it a certain Lapp had said to Inger that summer—­something about not having bought?  Buy, what should he buy for?  The ground was there, the forest was there; he had cleared and tilled, built up a homestead in the midst of a natural wilderness, winning bread for himself and his, asking nothing of any man, but working, and working alone.  He had often thought himself of asking the Lensmand [Footnote:  Sheriff’s officer, in charge of a small district.] about the matter when he went down to the village, but had always put it off; the Lensmand was not a pleasant man to deal with, so people said, and Isak was not one to talk much.  What could he say if he went—­what had he come for?

One day that winter the Lensmand himself came driving up to the place.  There was a man with him, and a lot of papers in a bag.  Geissler himself, the Lensmand, no less.  He looked at the broad open hillside, cleared of timber, smooth and unbroken under the snow; he thought perhaps that it was all tilled land already, for he said: 

“Why, this is a whole big farm you’ve got.  You don’t expect to get all this for nothing?”

There it was!  Isak was terror-stricken and said not a word.

“You ought to have come to me at first, and bought the land,” said Geissler.

“Ay.”

The Lensmand talked of valuations, of boundaries, taxes, taxes to the State, and, when he had explained the matter a little, Isak began to see that there was something reasonable in it after all.  The Lensmand turned to his companion teasingly.  “Now then, you call yourself a surveyor, what’s the extent of cultivated ground here?” He did not wait for the other to reply, but noted down himself, at a guess.  Then he asked Isak about the crops, how much hay, how many bushels of potatoes.  And then about boundaries.  They could not go round the place marking out waist-deep in snow; and in summer no one could get up there at all.  What did Isak think himself about the extent of woodland and pasturage?—­Isak had no idea at all; he had always thought of the place as being his own as far as he could see.  The Lensmand said that the State required definite boundaries.  “And the greater the extent, the more you will have to pay.”