Sivert, on the other hand, was rather a disappointment.  Not that he was any way slack, and failed to sell his goods—­’twas he, indeed, sold most—­but he did not get enough for them.  “You don’t put in enough patter with it,” said Andresen.

No, Sivert was no hand at reeling off a lot of talk; he was a fieldworker, sure of what he said, and speaking calmly when he spoke at all.  What was there to talk about here?  Also, Sivert was anxious to be done with it and get back home, there was work to do in the fields.

“Tis that Jensine’s calling him,” Fredrik Stroem explained.  Fredrik, himself, by the way, had work on his own fields to be done that spring, and little time to waste; but for all that, he must look in on Aronsen the last day and get up an argument with him.  “I’ll sell him the empty sacks,” said he.

Andresen and Sivert stayed outside while he went in.  They heard grand goings-on inside the store, both talking at once, and Fredrik setting up a laugh now and again; then Aronsen threw open the door and showed his visitor out.  Oh, but Fredrik didn’t come out—­no, he took his time, and talked a lot more.  The last thing they heard from outside was Fredrik trying to sell Aronsen a lot of rocking-horses.

Then the caravan went home again—­three young men full of life and health.  They marched and sang, slept a few hours in the open, and went on again.  When they got back to Sellanraa on the Monday, Isak had begun sowing.  The weather was right for it; the air moist, with the sun peeping out now and again, and a mighty rainbow strung right across the heavens.

The caravan broke up—­Farvel, Farvel....

* * * * *

Isak at his sowing; a stump of a man, a barge of a man to look at, nothing more.  Clad in homespun—­wool from his own sheep, boots from the hide of his own cows and calves.  Sowing—­and he walks religiously bareheaded to that work; his head is bald just at the very top, but all the rest of him shamefully hairy; a fan, a wheel of hair and beard, stands out from his face.  ’Tis Isak, the Margrave.

’Twas rarely he knew the day of the month—­what need had he of that?  He had no bills to be met on a certain date; the marks on his almanac were to show the time when each of the cows should bear.  But he knew St. Olaf’s Day in the autumn, that by then his hay must be in, and he knew Candlemas in spring, and that three weeks after then the bears came out of their winter quarters; all seed must be in the earth by then.  He knew what was needful.

A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite.  A ghost risen out of the past to point the future, a man from the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old, and, withal, a man of the day.

Nay, there was nothing left to him now of the copper mine and its riches—­the money had vanished into air.  And who had anything left of all that wealth when the working stopped, and the hills lay dead and deserted?  But the Almenning was there still, and ten new holdings on that land, beckoning a hundred more.