From that hour my mother was out of her mind.  For many years she had to be constantly watched in her own room, and my father must have had many a sad hour.  Afterwards she was taken to a lunatic asylum in Trondhjem, where two years later she died, without having come to her right mind for one moment.

The person who had the charge of me during this time was old Anne Kvaen, a pock-marked, masculine-looking woman, with little brown eyes, rough, iron-grey hair, strongly marked, almost witch-like features, and as a rule a short, black clay pipe in her mouth.  She had been my mother’s nurse, and was attached to her with her whole soul.  When my mother went out of her mind, she begged earnestly to become her guardian in the blue room; but this had to be given up, as it was evident that it was just her presence that most excited the patient’s mind.  My mother could not bear to see father either, and me they never dared show her at all.

Old Anne Kvaen had been my mother’s only confidante.  She was extremely superstitious and strange.  In her imagination, hobgoblins and gnomes occupied the store-house and boat-house, as surely as my father resided in the main building; and under the mountain to the east of the harbour, the underground people carried on, invisibly, their fishing and trading with Bergen, just as my father did his, visibly, in the world.  Old Anne had certainly filled my poor mother’s head with her mystic superstition, to no less an extent than she did mine.  There were all kinds of marks and signs to be made from morning till night, and she always wore an uneasy look, as though she were keeping watch.  When a boat came in, you ought to turn towards the sea, and spit, and mutter a few words against sea-sprites.  She could see every man’s double. [The spirit which every one is supposed to have as a follower and companion through life.] On its account the door must be shut to quickly after any one had gone out; and she could always hear a warning beforehand when father was coming home from a journey.

When Anne Kvaen had no longer leave to go into the blue room to my mother, she silently went through all kinds of performances outside the door.  I remember once standing on the stairs, and seeing her bowing and curtseying, wetting her finger every now and then, drawing on the door with it, and muttering, until I fled in terror.

In her incantation formulae, the word “Jumala” often occurred, the name of the Bjarmers’ old god, whose memory, in the far north, is not so completely eradicated as one would think, and who to this day has perhaps some sacrificial stone or other on the wide mountain wastes of Finland.  Against Lap witchcraft—­and a suspicion of it was fastened on almost every Lap boat that landed at the quay—­she also had her charms; she apparently melted down Fin and Christian gods together in her mystical incantations, for the confounding of Lap witchcraft.

In the midst of such mental impressions as these, I grew up.