of fresh pasture moved more briskly; the pony tossed his head and whinnied.  Not far from the cottages there came to meet them a little old woman, dark and wiry, with bright searching eyes.  Her face was wrinkled all over in fine soft lines, but her hair was hardly gray at all.  She wore a pointed hood and girdled tunic of tanned reindeer hide, with leggings and shoes of the same.  A blanket about her shoulders was draped into a kind of pouch, in which she carried on her back a tow-headed, solemn-eyed baby.

“Welcome to you, Thorolf Erlandsson,” she said, just as if she had been expecting him.  “With this good milk we shall fare like the King.”

No king, truly, could have supped on food more delicious than that enjoyed by Nils and Thorolf on this first night in the saeter.  It is strange but true that the most exquisite delights are those that money cannot buy.  No man can taste cold spring water and barley bread in absolute perfection who has not paid the poor man’s price—­hard work and keen hunger.

When Nikolina, Karen and Lovisa came up with the smaller children the place had already an inhabited, homelike look.  There was even a wise old raven, almost as large as a gander, whom Nils had christened Munin, after Odin’s bird.  The little ones had all the new milk they could drink from their wooden bowls, and were put to bed in the movable wooden bed-places, on beds of hay covered with sheepskins and blankets.  All were asleep before dark, for at that season the night lasted only two or three hours.  The last thing that Thorolf heard was a happy little pipe from the five-year-old Ellida,—­

“Now we shall live in Asgard forever and ever.”

For all it had to do with the experience of many of the children the saeter might really have been Asgard, the Norse paradise.  The youngest had never before been outside the narrow valley where they were born.  Ellida and Margit, Didrik and little Peder, could not be convinced that they were anywhere but in Asgard the Blest.

Norway had long since become Christian, but the old faith was not forgotten.  The legends, songs and customs of the people were full of it.  In the sagas Asgard was described as being on a mountain at the top of the world.  Around the base of this mountain lay Midgard, the abode of mankind.  Beyond the great seas, in Utgard, the giants lived.  Hel was the under-world, the home of evil ghosts and spirits.  Tales were told in the long winter evenings, of Baldur the god of spring, Loki the crafty, Odin the old one-eyed beggar in a hooded cloak, with his two ravens and his two tame wolves, Freya the lovely lady of flowers, Elle-folk dancing in the moonlight, and little rascally Trolls.

The songs and legends repeated by the old people or chanted by minstrels or skalds were more than idle stories—­they were the history of a race.  Children heard over and over again the family records telling in rude rhyme the story of centuries.  In distant Iceland, Greenland, the Shetlands, the Faroes or the Orkneys, a Norseman could tell exactly what might be his udall right, or right of inheritance, in the land of his fathers.