When Love Calls

Transcriber's Notes: 1. Page scan source: http://books.google.com/books?id=1XsNAAAAYAAJ (Harvard College Library)
Copyright, 1899 By Brown and Company
Clare, I said, I wish that we had brought some better clothes, if it were only one frock. You look the oddest figure.
And she did. She was lying head to head with me on the thick moss that clothed one part of the river-bank above Breistolen near the Sogn Fiord. We were staying at Breistolen, but there was no moss thereabouts, nor in all the Sogn district, I often thought, so deep and soft, and so dazzling orange and white and crimson as that particular patch. It lay quite high upon the hills, and there were great gray boulders peeping through the moss here and there, very fit to break your legs if you were careless. Little more than a mile higher up was the watershed, where our river, putting away with reluctance a first thought of going down the farther slope towards Bysberg, parted from its twin brother who was thither bound with scores upon scores of puny green-backed fishlets; and instead, came down our side gliding and swishing, and swirling faster and faster, and deeper and wider, every hundred yards to Breistolen, full of red-speckled yellow trout all half-a-pound apiece, and very good to eat.
But they were not so sweet or toothsome to our girlish tastes as the tawny-orange cloud-berries which Clare and I were eating as we lay. So busy was she with the luscious pile we had gathered that I had to wait for an answer. And then, Speak for yourself, she said. I'm sure you look like a short-coated baby. He is somewhere up the river too. Munch, munch, munch!
Who is, you impertinent, greedy little chit?
Oh, you know, she answered. Don't you wish you had your gray plush here, Bab?
I flung a look of calm disdain at her; but whether it was the berry juice which stained our faces that took from its effect, or the free mountain air which papa says saps the foundations of despotism, that made her callous, at any rate she only laughed scornfully and got up and went off down the stream with her rod, leaving me to finish the cloud-berries, and stare lazily up at the snow patches on the hillside--which somehow put me in mind of the gray plush--and follow or not as I liked.