Wild apples fell, grain ripened, nights lengthened.  Long ago the twin-flower, violet, wild pansy, forget-me-not and yellow anemone had left their fairy haunts, and there remained only the curving fantastic fronds of the fern,—­the dragon-grass.  Then had come brilliant spots and splashes of color on the summer slopes—­purple butterwort, golden ragweed, aconite, buttercup, deep crimson mossy patches of saxifrage, rosy heather, catchfly, wild geranium, cinnamon rose.  These also finished their triumphal procession and went to their Valhalla.  Then one September morning the children woke to hear the wind screaming as if the White Eagle had escaped his prison, and the rain pelting the world.

All summer they had been out, rain or shine, like water-ouzels, but now they were glad to sit about the fire with the shutters all closed, and the smoke now and then driven down into the room by the storm.  Before evening the little ones were begging for stories.

“I wish I could remember a saga I heard last Yule,” Nikolina said at last.  “It was about a voyage the Vikings made to a country where the people had never seen cattle.  When they heard the cattle bellowing they all ran away and left the furs they had come to sell.”

“Tell all you remember and make up the rest,” suggested Karen, but Nikolina shook her head.

“One should never do that with a saga.”

“I know that tale,” spoke up Thorolf suddenly, although he had never in his life repeated a saga.  “Grandmother used to tell it.  In the beginning Bjarni Heriulfson the sea-rover, after many years came home to Iceland to drink wassail in his father’s house.  But strangers dwelt there and told him that his father was gone to Greenland, and he set sail for that land.  Soon was the ship swallowed up in a gray mist in which were neither sun nor stars.  They sailed many days they knew not where, but suddenly the fog lifted and the sun revealed to them a coast of low hills covered with forest.  By this Bjarni thought that it was not Greenland but some southerly coast.  Therefore turned he northward and sailed many days before he sighted the mountains of Greenland and his father’s house.

“Years afterward returned Bjarni to Iceland, and in his telling of that voyage it came to the ears of Leif Ericsson, who asked him many questions about the land he had seen.  There grew no trees in Iceland or Greenland, fit for house-timber, and Leif was minded to find out this place of great forests.  Thus it came that Leif sailed from Brattahlid in Greenland with five and thirty men in a long ship upon a journey of discovery.

“First came they to a barren land covered with big flat stones, and this Leif named Helluland, the slate land.  Southward sailed he for many days until he saw a coast covered with wooded hills, and there he landed, calling it Markland, the land of woods.  Then southward again they bore and came to a place where a river flowed out of a lake and fell into the sea.  The country was pleasant, with good fishing.  Leif said that they would spend the winter there, and they built wooden cabins well-made and warm.