My father, in middle age, was a handsome man, black-haired and dark-skinned, with sharp, energetic features, and in height rather short than tall.  He always wore a brown duffel, seaman’s jacket, and glazed hat.  In manner he was stern, and not very accessible; it was said, too, that he was rather a hard man—­for which the severe school of life through which he had passed was perhaps to blame.  If this manner, on the one hand, made him few friends, on the other, it gained for him a greater confidence in business matters, in which he was prompt and expeditious, always claiming to the utmost what he considered to be his due.  People feared him, and would not willingly be on bad terms with him.

We have generally only flashing recollections of what has happened before our eighth year, but these flashes last for a whole lifetime.  I have in my mind just such a picture of my poor unhappy mother.  I know her better from that than from all I have heard about her since; from what I have been told she must have had fair hair and soft blue eyes, have been pale and delicate, and in figure rather tall.  She was also very quiet and melancholy.

She was Erlandsen’s only daughter, and was married to my father while he was yet a subordinate in Erlandsen’s service, and it was said that it was the old man who brought about the union, thinking it the best way to provide for her future.

I remember a warm summer day, and the mowers in their shirt-sleeves, mowing with long scythes, out in the meadow:  I was with my mother, as she passed by them, knitting.  Outside the fence lay a half-bare rocky hill, behind which my mother had a bench.  Above this on a stony heap grew raspberry-bushes, and beside them stood a few small birch-trees.  While I was scrambling about among the stones, picking raspberries, father called my mother.

When she had gone away, there came over to me from the other side of the hill a tall, pale lady, who seemed older than mother, dressed in black, with a stand-up, white, frilled collar; she looked at me very kindly, and stretched out to me a wild rose spray she had in her hand.

I did not feel at all afraid, and it did not seem as if she were a stranger.  Then she nodded sadly to me in farewell, and went back the same way she had come.

When mother returned I told her that such a kind, strange lady had been there, but she must have been in great sorrow, and now she was gone.

My mother—­I remember it, as if it were yesterday—­stood still for a minute, as white as a sheet, looking at me with anguish in her eyes, as if we were both going to die, then she threw her arms above her head, and fell fainting to the ground.

I was too frightened to cry, but I remember that, while she lay stretched insensible on the grass by the bench, I threw myself upon her, crying, “Mother! mother!”

A little while after I had come running to father, who stood in his shirt-sleeves over in the meadow, mowing with the others, and had said, sobbing, that mother was dead.