It was midsummer. The mountain region was hazy in the heat; all the distance was as if enveloped in smoke. The girls on the farm went about barefooted, in waists and short petticoats. It was a scorching heat, so that the pitch ran in sticky white lines down from the fat knots in the timber of the newly built pigsty, where Marit was giving swill to the hogs. Some sand-scoured wooden milk-pans stood on edge by the well, drying, while one or two sparrows and wagtails hopped about or perched nodding on the well-curb, and the blows of the axe resounded from the wood-shed in the quiet of the afternoon. Pasop lay panting in the shade behind the outer door, which stood open.
The captain had finished his afternoon nap, and stood by the field looking at Great-Ola and the horses ploughing up an old grassland which was to be laid down again.
The bumble-bee was humming in the garden. With about the same monotonous voice, Thinka and Inger-Johanna, sitting by the stone table in the summer-house over the cracked blue book-cover and the dog-eared, well-thumbed leaves, mumbled the Catechism and Commentary, with elbows and heads close to each other. They had to learn pages eighty-four to eighty-seven before supper time, and they held their fingers in their ears so as not to disturb each other.
There was darkness like a shadow just outside of the garden fence. But they saw nothing, heard nothing; the long passage of Scripture went way over on the second page.
Then there was a gay clearing of a throat. "Might one interrupt the two young ladies with earthly affairs?"
They both looked up at the same time. The light hop leaves about the summer-house had not yet entirely covered the trellis.
With his arms leaning on the garden fence there stood a young man—he might have been standing there a long time—with a cap almost without a visor over thick brown hair. His face was sunburned and swollen.
The eyes, which gazed on them, looked dreadfully wicked.
Neither of them saw more; for, by a common impulse at the phenomenon, they ran in utter panic out of the door, leaving the books spread open behind them, and up the steps in to Ma, who was in the kitchen buttering bread for lunch.
"There was a man standing—there was a man out by the garden fence. It was certainly not any one who goes around begging or anything like that."