CHAPTER XXX

IN THE BERRY WOODS

It was high summer. The fields were like brides clad in blossoming clover, camomile, daisies, and blue-bells. Wild strawberries and ‘arctic raspberries’ shone bright red along the roadsides. Raspberries were ripening in the forest clearings, and the mile-wide marshes were full of unripe cloud-berries which, yellow or rosy, were still protected by the four-leaved, blue-green hard calyx of the flower.

Grindstones were turning in the farmyards to sharpen scythes. Along the house walls stood rakes painted in bright colors. For it was almost haying time, and with that came something of festivity and rush, of life and the joy of work. But it had not yet begun. The cows were still up at the dairy farms.

Andy and Maglena, who had drawn back from the settlements, heard and saw both cows and goats as they followed the forest paths between the dairy farms. If they reached one before evening, all well and good. If not, they did not think they suffered any by sleeping out-of-doors now and again.

At those times they ate their supper in some really lovely blueberry glade, and slept in the heather, although the sun, as its habit is up there in Norrland, shone nearly all night.

Andy had learned to make a horn out of split bits of pine and birch-bark, and he had hardly waked up in the morning and sat up in the moss glittering with dew, before he began to blow, greatly pleased when he was able to force out several tones in succession. He kept on with it tirelessly, when he was not helping Maglena strip fine roots and tough runners out of which they were going to make baskets to sell when they had to go back to the settlements.

One evening, near haying time, Andy and Maglena were deep in the forest wilds. It was Saturday evening, and they had found a lovely spot: had just happened upon an open place beautifully shaded by weeping birches and other leafy trees.

A little stream in whose deep clear water brook trout splashed and threw themselves about, shining like silver, flowed near by, murmuring softly. In the middle of the opening there was a huge stone. It was flat on top, and although it was so high and steep as to be almost inaccessible, Andy had climbed up, with the greatest difficulty, for he thought it was a fitting pulpit for a service in the forest church on a Saturday evening.

Maglena, who stood below, had rung in the Sabbath--‘Bing, bong, bing, bong’--and at the same time had pounded the stone with another stone that seemed to her to give forth a ringing sound.

Andy stood up there on the rocks, earnest, with bowed head and folded hands. Maglena sat on a mossy knoll, just as earnest and with folded hands.

The minister, Andy, in a solemn voice, read a psalm out of an old song-book that mother had had. Then he raised his head. The late afternoon sun shooting beams down between the tree-trunks laid a shimmer of light over his brown-skinned, angular little face with the deep, serious eyes and the dark hair.