Snow fell slowly, in great, wet flakes; he toiled up over the coasting hill, in order to turn into the forest on the left. Never before, winter or summer, had he climbed this hill without recalling something that made him happy, or to which he was looking forward. Now it was a dull, weary walk. He slipped in the damp snow, his knees were stiff, either from the party yesterday or from his low spirits; he felt that it was all over with the coasting-hill for that year, and with it, forever. He longed for something different as he threaded his way in among the tree-trunks, where the snow fell softly. A frightened ptarmigan screamed and fluttered a few yards away, but everything else stood as if awaiting a word which never was spoken. But what his aspirations were, he did not distinctly know, only they concerned nothing at home, nothing abroad, neither pleasure nor work; but rather something far above, soaring upward like a song. Soon all became concentrated in one defined desire, and this was to be confirmed in the spring, and on that occasion to be number one. His heart beat wildly as he thought of it, and before he could yet hear his father's axe in the quivering little trees, this wish throbbed within him with more intensity than anything he had known in all his life.
His father, as usual, did not have much to say to him; they chopped away together and both dragged the wood into heaps. Now and then they chanced to meet, and on one such occasion Oyvind remarked, in a melancholy tone, "A houseman has to work very hard."
"He as well as others," said the father, as he spit in the palm of his hand and took up the axe again.
When the tree was felled and the father had drawn it up to the pile,
Oyvind said,—
"If you were a gardman you would not have to work so hard."
"Oh! then there would doubtless be other things to distress us," and he grasped his axe with both hands.
The mother came up with dinner for them; they sat down. The mother was in high spirits, she sat humming and beating time with her feet.
"What are you going to make of yourself when you are grown up, Oyvind?" said she, suddenly.
"For a houseman's son, there are not many openings," he replied.
"The school-master says you must go to the seminary," said she.