“Where is the Fremmad man? where is the Fremmad man?”
“The stranger is here in the house,” was the reply.
And in came a man, who had evidently just dressed in his best, with something very like death written in his sunken cheeks, starting eyes, and sharpened features.
“Can you tell me what is good for so and so?” he asked. “Oh! what pain I endure.”
The poor fellow was clearly suffering from the stone, and there was no doctor within a great many days’ journey. His doom was evidently sealed.
Further up the valley, a fierce thunder-storm coming on, I entered one of the smoke-houses above described, where an old lady, Gunvor Thorsdatter, bid me welcome. She offered me her mull of home-dried sneeshing—it was rather a curious affair, being shaped like a swan’s-egg pear, and sprigged all over with silver. A very small aperture, stopped by a cork, was the only way of getting at the precious dust. Gunvor was above eighty, but in full possession of her faculties, and I judged her therefore not an unlikely person to have some old stories.
“What do you sing to the babies when you want to make them sleep?”
“I don’t know. All sorts of things.”
“Well, will you repeat me one?”
She looked hard at me for a moment, and suddenly all the deep furrows across her countenance puckered up and became contorted, just like a ploughed field when the harrow has passed over it. A stifled giggle next escaped her through her erkos odontôn, which was still white, and without gaps. A slight suspicion that I was making fun of her I at once removed from her mind; then, looking carefully round, and seeing that there was nobody else by, she croaked out, in a sort of monotonous melody, the following, which I give literally in English:—