Chapter Fourteen.
Midnight.
This was the day when the first cheese of the season was found to be perfect and complete. Frolich, Stiorna, and Erica examined it carefully, and pronounced it a well-pressed, excellent Gammel cheese, such as they should not be ashamed to set before the bishop, and therefore one which ought to satisfy the demon. It now only remained to carry it to its destination,—to the ridge where the first cheese of the season was always laid for the demon, and where, it appeared, he regularly came for his offering, as no vestige of the gift was ever to be found the next morning,—only the round place in the grass where it had lain, and the marks of some feet which had trodden the herbage.
“Help me up with it upon my head, Stiorna,” said Erica. “If Frolich looks at it any longer, she will grudge such a cheese going where it ought. Is not that the thought that is in your mind at this moment, Frolich, dear?”
“No. I do not grudge it,” replied Frolich. “My mother says it is right freely to give whatever the feelings of those who help us require.”
“And you do thus freely give,—my mistress and all who belong to her, without a sign of grudging,” declared Erica. “But, would you not be better pleased if the gift required was a bunch of mossflowers, or a basket of cloud-berries?”
“Perhaps so;—yet, no; I think not. Our good cheeses are not wasted. They do not lie and rot in the sun and the mists. Somebody has the benefit of them, whether it be the demon or not.”
“Who else should it be?” asked Stiorna. “There is not a man, woman, or child, on any seater in Sulitelma, who would touch a cheese laid out for the mountain-demon.”