A Norwegian Story.
It was a room at the top of a rough wooden house in Norway. Though it was only a garret, it was all very white and clean; and little Erik Svenson lay in the small bed facing the barred window, through which the moonbeams streamed till they seemed to turn the walls into polished silver.
As Erik tossed about, he heard his mother working in the room below.
The thump, thump, of her iron, as she wearily finished the last of the clothes, that must be sent home to the rich family at the farmhouse, early next morning.
"Poor mother! how hard she works," thought Erik, "and I can't do more than mind Farmer Torvald's boat on the fiord. If I could only be employed in the town, I might be able to help her!"
Thump, thump, went the iron. The clock chimed twelve, and still the poor washerwoman smoothed and folded, though her heavy eyes almost refused to keep open, and the room began to feel the chill of the frosty air outside.
"Erik sha'n't want for anything while I have two arms to work for him," she said to herself; and went on until the iron fell from her tired hand, and she sank back in her chair in a deep sleep.
Erik, too, had closed his eyes, and was dreaming happily, when he was awakened by the brush of something light and soft, across his pillow.
Starting up, he saw that the moon was still brilliant, and in its clearest rays stood a faint white figure, with shadowy wings outstretched behind it.
A vapoury garment enveloped it, and the face seemed young and beautiful.
"Oh, how wonderful! How wonderful you are!" cried Erik. "Why have I never seen you before?"
"I am Vanda, the Spirit of the Moon," said the Angel gently. "Only to those who are in need of help can I become visible. Your mother knows me well. Winter and summer, I have soothed her to sleep; and to-night, as you looked from the window, your thoughts joined mine, and I was able to come to you. What will you ask of me?"
"Oh, Vanda, dear Vanda! Show me how to help my mother; I ask nothing else!" cried Erik.
He jumped from his bed, and threw himself at the feet of the shadowy Angel.
"Do you see that window?" said the Moon-Spirit, pointing to the small panes that were now covered with a delicate tracery of glittering frost-work. "Of what do those patterns remind you?"
"Of flowers!" cried Erik. "I have often thought so. Sometimes I can see grasses, and boughs, and roses, but always lilies, because they are so white and spotless."
The Angel smiled softly.
"To-night I shall shine upon them, and make them live," she said. "Take what you will find upon the window sill at sunrise, and sell them in the town. Bring the money back to your mother at night-time."
With the last words the Moon-Spirit melted into the white light, leaving Erik with a feeling of the happiest expectation.
Long before daybreak he was awake, and his first thought was of the wonderful ice-flowers. Would the Angel have kept her promise? What would he see awaiting him?
As the rays of the sun shot over the fiord, he sprang out of bed and ran to the window. There lay a bunch of beautiful white lilies, nestling in a mass of delicate moss-like green.
"They are the frost-flowers!" cried Erik, and wild with joy he rushed into his mother's room, and held the bunch up for her to look at.
"Look, look, mother! See what we have had given us. We shall soon have enough money to rent the little farm you have always been longing for!"
Erik's visit to the town was very successful. He sold his flowers directly, although he had some difficulty in answering all the questions of the townspeople, who wanted to know where he had grown such delicate things in the middle of a severe winter. To everyone he replied that it was a secret; and they were obliged to be contented.
He returned home in good time for his work upon the fiord, and if it had not been for the store of silver pieces he poured into his mother's work-box, he would almost have imagined that he had only been dreaming.
That night, as he laid his curly head upon the pillow, his mind was full of thoughts about the Moon-Angel. He wondered if she would appear again, and whether she would once more leave him her gift of the white frost-flowers.
The moon shone with silvery clearness into the garret; and as the boy strained his eyes towards the window, the bright form slowly floated through the bars and stretched a pale hand towards him.
"You have done well, to-day, Erik. Look to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, until my light has waned and faded; and every day you will find the lilies waiting for you."
Again Erik felt the soft brush of Vanda's wings, and she disappeared in the path of the moonbeams.
The next morning the flowers lay fresh and fair upon the window-sill, and for days the frost-lilies were always blooming.
But each time the bunch grew smaller and smaller, until at last, when the moon was nothing more than a thread of brightness, Erik found one single blossom lying half drooping on the window-frame.
"Vanda's gifts have ended," thought Erik, "but she has been a good true friend to us! We have gained enough money for my mother to put away her iron, and take the little farmhouse by the fiord. How happy we shall be together."
The winter was nearly over, and Erik and his mother had settled down to their happy life in the farmhouse.
Frost-flowers, with delicate fantastic groupings, still bloomed upon the window-panes; but the Moon-Angel was not there to give them her fairy-like gifts of life and beauty.
She had gone to console other struggling workers.
The Alpen-Echo.
Long, long years ago, a young girl wandering with her herd of goats upon the Mettenalp, lost her way amidst a mountain storm, and fell into a chasm of the rock, where she lay white and lifeless.
The terrified goats reached the valley beneath, but the young girl was never again heard of.
The spirits of the great mountain had claimed her for an Alpen-Echo, and every day, for hundreds of years after, she floated amongst the snow-covered peaks and crags of the Mettenalp, answering every horn that sounded from the hunters or cow-herds, with a soft, sweet note, so sad and distant it was like a soul in pain, and tears came to your eyes—you knew not why—as you listened to its exquisite music.
"Come, follow me! Follow me to my secret haunts," wailed the Echo. "Give me my soul! Give me my soul!"—but no one through all the centuries had ever climbed to the Echo's hiding-place.
"If only I could make them understand!" sobbed the Echo, "my long bondage would cease. The first foot that treads my prison, frees me, and gives me rest."
However, all the world was too busy to listen to the poor Echo, and she called and cried in vain through the misty ages!
A boy, with a long Alpen-horn in his hand, stood by a châlet far away in the wilds of Switzerland. Every now and then he blew a few wailing notes upon the horn—notes that echoed across the valley, up to the snow-covered heights beyond—and he smiled as the answer floated clearly back again.
"The echoes are talking together, to-day," he said to himself. "They love the bright air and the sunshine;" and again he blew a long, changing note, that died away softly into the far distance.
"Tra-la-la-a-a" came faintly from the opposite mountain—but to the boy's astonishment the echo did not now cease, and fade away, as it always had done before. It shifted from point to point; its elfin tones ringing sweet and sad like the bugle of a Fairy Huntsman.
All that day the Echo sounded in the boy's ears, all night it whispered amongst the mountain tops; and as soon as it became daylight he sprang up, determined that he would climb the side of the opposite valley, and find out the reason of the strange music.
A pale-green light tinged the sky, the mountains looked dark and forbidding, and from the peaks above came the soft sighing of the distant Echo.
"It is like a soul in pain," thought the boy. "I must find out what it means!" and he began to climb higher and higher, until the valley lay far beneath him, and his home looked a little brown speck amidst a sea of fields and pine trees.
Before him still sounded the Elfin voice, now dying into a whisper, now ringing clear and distinct, as though close beside him—but always with the same beseeching sadness: "Follow me! Follow me to my secret haunts! Give me my soul! Give me my soul!" And the boy climbed on until he reached the rocky crag which formed the summit of the mountain.
"At last!" he cried, as he stretched out his arms to clasp the Echo's fairy-like form that floated mistily before him ... but the Echo had faded from his sight as he approached her; and her last words were borne faintly towards him as she vanished into the golden glory of the sunshine—
"At last! At last! I am at rest at last!"
The boy had learnt the secret of the Alpen-Echo. He had freed her soul from its long bondage, and a few days afterwards they found him lying with a smile upon his face on the topmost peak of the Mettenalp.
The Scroll in the Market Place.
In the pale light of the moon the sleeping town lay hushed and noiseless. At its foot the river rolled, spanned by the curves of the old grey stone bridge, and behind rose the giant hills, clothed with tracts of pine and birch trees. A high wall surrounded the town, with towers at intervals, from which gleamed the light of the watchmen's lanterns.
All was silent on the earth and in the air, when through the deep blue of the star-sprinkled sky a little Child-Angel winged his way from Heaven, and hovering over the steep red roofs beneath him, folded his wings and dropped softly into the deserted Market Place. In his hand he held a Scroll with strange writing upon it, and crossing the Square over the rough cobblestones, he fixed the paper to the Fountain, and spreading his white wings, flew up again to the home from which he came.
Next day the country people flocking into the Market Place saw to their astonishment a track of beautiful white flowers springing up from amongst the cobblestones, and stretching from one corner of the Square to the Fountain.
They were star-like flowers, with bright-green leaves, and they grew in patches—"like a child's footsteps," the women said.
A little crowd soon gathered round the paper fastened to the ancient Fountain. On the top of the Scroll was written, very clearly—"All those who can read the words beneath shall be rewarded generously," but the lines that followed were in a strange language, and in such crabbed characters that they defied every effort to decipher them.
All day the crowd ebbed and flowed round the Fountain, while the learned men of the town came with their dictionaries under their arms and spectacles on nose, and sat on stools, attempting to make out the crooked letters of the inscription.
In the end each one decided upon a different language, and the argument became so warm between them that they had to be separated by a party of watchmen, and conducted back again to their own houses.
Professors from the University on the other side of the mountains journeyed over the rough roads, and brought their learning to the old stone Fountain in the Market Place—but they, too, went away discomfited.
No one could read the strange writing, and no one could pull down the paper, for it appeared to be fixed to the stone by some means that made it impossible to tear it away.
Time went on, and the snow covered up the Market Square, threw a white mantle over the steep roofs, and buried the old gardens in its soft deepness.
In one of the houses near the spot where the little Angel had first touched the earth lived a poor, lonely woman. She worked all day at some fine kind of needlework, but when, in the evenings, the sun had set and the twilight began to fall, she would steal out for a few minutes to breathe the fresh air. Often, though she was so wearied with her incessant stitching, she would carry in her hand a flower from the plants that grew in her latticed window to a neighbour's sick child. It was a weary climb up a steep flight of stairs to the attic where the sick child lay, but it was reward enough to the woman to see the bright smile that lighted up the little drawn face as she laid the flower on the counterpane.
All the summer the poor sempstress had been too busy during the daylight, to afford time even to cross the Square to study the strange paper on the Fountain. "If learned men cannot read it, a poor ignorant woman like me could certainly never do so," she said to the child, and the little girl looked up at her with tender love in her eyes.
"You are so good, you could do anything," she whispered, and clasped the worn hand on which the needle-pricks had left the marks of many long years of patient sewing. "I should like to see the paper so much," continued the child, after a thoughtful pause. "I wish I could walk there, but it is so long since I walked, and the snow is so deep now," and she sighed.
"Some day, if the good God pleases, I will carry you there," said the workwoman—and the child as she lay patiently on her little bed, dreamt and dreamt of the mysterious paper that no one could read, until the longing to see it became uncontrollable, and her friend the sempstress promised that she would spare an hour the next day from her work, and if the sun shone she would carry the invalid across the Market Place to the old stone Fountain.
The next morning the child's face was bright with anticipation, as the woman wrapped her in a warm shawl and carried her fragile weight down the staircase. The cobblestones hurt the poor sempstress's feet, and she staggered under the light burden, but she persevered, for the child's murmurs of delight rang in her ears—
"How sweetly the sun shines! How white the snow looks! How beautiful, how beautiful it is to be alive!"
When they reached the Fountain the sun shone brightly upon the Angel's Scroll.
The workwoman seated herself on one of the swept stone steps, still holding the child in her arms, and they gazed long and earnestly at the writing above them.
Gradually a smile of delight spread across both their faces. "It is quite, quite easy!" they cried together. "How is it people have been puzzling so long?"—for as they looked the crabbed letters unrolled before them, straightened, and arranged themselves in order, and the Angel's message was read by the poor workwoman and the sick child.
"Love God, and live for others," said the Scroll, and a soft light seemed to stream from it and shed a glow of happiness right into the hearts of the two who read it. The air was warmer, the sun shone more brightly, and just by the foot of the Fountain, pushing through the snow, sprang one blue head of palest forget-me-not.
As the letters on the Scroll became plainer and plainer, the paper slowly rolled up and shrunk away, until it had disappeared altogether.
The sempstress carried back the child up the steep staircase, laid her tenderly on her bed, and hurried away to her own attic.
In her absence strange things had happened. The room was swept and tidy, the flowers were watered, and the piece of work she had left half done was lying finished on the broad window seat. The poor woman looked round her in astonishment. She went downstairs to enquire if any neighbours had prepared this surprise for her, but they only stared at her, and told her "she must have left her wits in the Market Place," and that "that was what came of leaving your own duties to look after other people's."
The sempstress did not listen to their taunts, for a song of joy was welling up in her heart—a song so sweet and true, it might have been the echo of that sung by the angels. Never had life seemed so beautiful to her. The ill looks of the neighbours appeared to her to be smiles of kindness and love; their hard speeches sounded soft and altered; the steep stairs to her room were not so steep, her attic not so bare and desolate. Life was no longer lonely, for the song in her heart brought her all the happiness she had ever hoped for.
The sick child, too, found the same wonderful change in all that surrounded her. The aunt with whom she lived, who had always been so careless and unloving, now seemed to the child to be kind and gentle. Her aching back was less painful, her thoughts as she lay on her bed were bright and happy. The Angel's message had brought sunshine to the lives of the only two who could read and understand it.
In time the sick child went to live with the sempstress, and their love for each other grew and strengthened, and overflowed in a thousand little acts of kindness to all who came near them. Their room was filled with brightness. The birds flew to perch on the window-sill and sing in the early mornings; flowers bloomed in the cracks of the old stonework; the sempstress sang as she worked, and whenever she left her sewing to carry the child out into the Market Place to breathe the fresh air she would find her work finished when she returned.
"It was a happy day that we read the message in the Market Place," she said to the sick child; "indeed we have been rewarded generously."
A Scrap of Etruscan Pottery.
Deep down in a buried Etruscan tomb there lay a little three-cornered piece of pottery.
It had some letters on it and a beautiful man's head, and had belonged to a King some three thousand years ago.
Its only companions were a family of moles; for everything else had been taken out of the tomb so long ago that no one remembered anything about it.
"What a dull life mine is," groaned the piece of pottery. "No amusement, and no society! It's enough to make one smash oneself to atoms!"
"Dull, but safe," replied the Mole, who never took the least notice of the three-cornered Chip's insults. "And then, remember the dignity. You have the whole tomb to yourself."
"Except for you," said the Chip ungraciously.
"Well, we must live somewhere," said the Mole, quite unmoved, "and I'm sure we don't interfere. I always bring up my children to treat you with the greatest respect, in spite of your being cr-r—br-r—. I should say, not quite so large as you used to be."
"If only you had belonged to a King," sighed the Chip, "I might have had someone of my own class to talk to."
"I don't wish to belong to a King," said the Mole. "There's nothing I should dislike more. I am for a Liberal Government, and no farming."
"What vulgarity!" cried the Chip.
"It's a blessing it's dark, and he can't see the children laughing," thought the Mole-mother, "or I don't know what would happen."
"Everything that belonged to a King should be treated with Royal respect," continued the Chip.
"As to that, I really haven't time for it," replied the Mole; "what with putting the children to bed, and getting them up again, and all my work in the passages, I can't devote myself to Court life."
"If you like, you can represent the people," said the Chip. "I don't mind, only then I can't talk to you."
"You can read out Royal Decrees, and make laws," said the Mole; and to herself she added, "It won't disturb me. I shan't take any notice of them."
"Who's to be nobles?" said the Chip, crossly. "I'd rather not do the thing at all, if it can't be done properly!"
"Well, I can't be people and nobles too, that's quite certain," remarked the Mole-mother, as she tidied up her house. "Besides, the children are too young—they wouldn't understand."
"What's it like up above?" enquired the Chip languidly after a short pause, for it was almost better to speak to the Mole, than to nobody. "People still walk on two legs?"
"Why, of course," answered the Mole, "there's never any difference in people, that I can see. They're always exactly alike, except in tempers."
The Chip was sitting upon a little stone-heap against one of the pillars. He fondly imagined it was a Throne; and the Mole-mother, with the utmost good nature, had never undeceived him.
As the last words were spoken, a lump of earth fell from the roof, flattening out the stone-heap, and the Chip only escaped destruction by rolling on one side, where he lay shaking with fright and calling to the Mole-mother to help him. But the Mole had retired with her family to a place of safety. She knew what was happening. The tomb was being opened by a party of antiquarians, and in a few more minutes the blue sky shone into the darkness, and the three-cornered piece of pottery was lying wrapped in paper in the pocket of one of the explorers.
When the Chip recovered himself, he found he was reclining on the velvet floor of a large glass case full of Etruscan vases. Here was the society he had been pining for all his life!
"What are Moles compared to this?" he said to himself, and quivered with joy at the thought of the pleasures before him.
"How did that broken thing come into our Division?" enquired a Red Dish with two handles.
"I can't imagine! The Director put him in just now," replied a Black Jug. "It's not what we're accustomed to. Everything in here is perfect."
The Chip lay for a moment, dumb with horror and astonishment.
"I belonged to a King," he gasped at last. "You can look at the name written on me."
"You may have names written all over you, for all I care," said the Dish. "You're a Chip, and no King can make you anything else"—and she turned away haughtily.
"And to think that for all those years the Mole-mother was never once rude to me!" thought the Chip. "She was a person of real refinement. Whatever shall I do if I have to be shut up with these ill-bred people?" he groaned miserably.
"How the woodwork does creak!" said the Director as he came up to the glass case, with a young lady to whom he was showing the treasures of the Museum.
"That's the most recent discovery," he continued smiling and pointing to the three-cornered piece of pottery—"All I found in my last digging."
"It has a beautiful head on it," said the young lady, "I should be quite satisfied if I could ever find anything so pretty."
"Will you have it?" said the Director of the Museum, who after all was only a young man; looking at the young lady earnestly.
She took the despised Chip in her little hand.
"Thank you very much. It will be a great treasure," she said—and looking up at her face, the three-cornered piece of pottery knew that a happy life was in store for him.
"In spite of the rudeness of my own people, I am in the Museum after all," remarked the Chip, as some months afterwards he hung on a bracket on the wall of the young lady's sitting room. "In what a superior position, too! They only belong to the Director, but I belong to the Director's wife!"