Now came the fire-engine and the flames were extinguished.  By this time it was morning.  I stood in the road, scarcely a hundred steps from the far-famed dale.  “One may as well spring into it as walk into it!” and I sprang into it; and the rain poured down, and the water flowed—­the whole dale was a well.

The trees turned their leaves the wrong side out, purely because of the pouring rain, and they said, as the rushes did the day before:  “We drink with our heads, we drink with our feet, and we drink with the whole body, and yet stand on our legs, hurra! it rains, and it pours; we whistle and we sing; it is our own song—­and it is quite new!”

Yes, that the rushes also sang yesterday—­but it was the same, ever the same.  I looked and looked, and all I know of the beauty of Zaether Dale is, that she had washed herself!

THE MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL IN LACKSAND.

* * * * *

Lacksand lay on the other side of the dal-elv which the road now led us over for the third or fourth time.  The picturesque bell-tower of red painted beams, erected at a distance from the church, rose above the tall trees on the clayey declivity:  old willows hung gracefully over the rapid stream.  The floating bridge rocked under us—­nay, it even sank a little, so that the water splashed under the horse’s hoofs; but these bridges have such qualities!  The iron chains that held it rattled, the planks creaked, the boards splashed, the water rose, and murmured and roared, and so we got over where the road slants upwards towards the town.  Close opposite here the last year’s May-pole still stood with withered flowers.  How many hands that bound these flowers are now withered in the grave?

It is far prettier to go up on the sloping bank along the elv, than to follow the straight high-road into the town.  The path conducts us, between pasture fields and leaf trees, up to the parsonage, where we passed the evening with the friendly family.  The clergyman himself was but lately dead, and his relatives were all in mourning.  There was something about the young daughter—­I knew not myself what it was—­but I was led to think of the delicate flax flower, too delicate for the short northern summer.

They spoke about the Midsummer festival the next day, and of the winter season here, when the swans, often more than thirty at a time, sit (motionless themselves) on the elv, and utter strange, mournful tones.  They always come in pairs, they said, two and two, and thus they also fly away again.  If one of them dies, its partner always remains a long time after all the others are gone; lingers, laments, and then flies away alone and solitary.

When I left the parsonage in the evening, the moon, in its first quarter, was up.  The May-pole was raised; the little steamer, ’Prince Augustus,’ with several small vessels in tow, came over the Siljan lake and into the elv; a musician sprang on shore, and began to play dances under the tall wreathed May-pole.  And there was soon a merry circle around it—­all so happy, as if the whole of life were but a delightful summer night.