What are the cradle-songs this Baby will hear in the cabin where she first saw the gray light of December? Verses from the old Kingos Psalm-book, ballads of the Long Serpent and King Olaf, of Queen Dagmar's death, the Whale Song, stories from the Iceland Sagas and the Nibelungenlied. Little verses, too, Mother Goosey jingles; one that is sung in Norwegian to babies in all the Scandinavian lands:—

Row, row to the fishing ground,
How many fishes have you found?
One for Father,
One for Mother,
One for Sister,
One for Brother,
One for him that drew the nets,
One for my little Baby.

Here is a little Faroe verse:—

Down comes the Puffin to the sea,
With his head carried high.
'Little Gray-titlark, lend me thy boat?'
'Small is my boat, short are my legs—
But come thee on board';
And the oars rattle in the oarlocks.

When the Baby grows a little bigger, she will not be taught that 'the Bossy-cow says, "Mo-o-o," the Pussy-cat says, "Me-ow."' No, she will learn what the birds say:—

The Puffin says, 'Ur-r! UR-R! UR-R!'
The Raven says, 'Kronk! KRONK! KRONK!'
The Crow says, 'Kra! KRA! KRA!'
The Eider-duck says, 'Ah-oo! AH-OO! AH-OO!'
The Wheatear says, 'Tck! TCK! TCK! None so pretty as I!'

and so on through a long list of the birds of fjeld and sea.

Summer and winter the birds will be the Baby's neighbors. From her father's cabin she can hear the eider-ducks cooing softly as they rise and fall just beyond the white crest of the breakers. Starlings bubble and chortle on the grassy house-roof; from the dark cliffs sounds the raven's clarion cry, and there are always sea-gulls near. With spring come all the sea-fowl to the bird-cliffs, and curlew, golden plover, and Arctic jaegers, 'plaintive creatures that pity themselves on moorlands.' All through the long dark winter the wren and titlark sing cheerfully. The 'mouse's brother' the Baby will call the Faroe wren, and she will know one fact of which grave scientists are ignorant, that the 'mouse's brother' and the titlark sing a bird-translation of a verse from the old Kingos Psalm-book. She will know, too, how the eider-duck won her down, the story of the naughty shag and the Apostle Peter, why the cormorant has no tongue, and that the great black-backed gull once struck our Lord upon the Cross and thenceforth bore a blood-red spot on his bill. Well can the Baby say in the words of the Kalevala, 'The birds of Heaven, the waves of the sea, have spoken and sung to me; the music of many waters has been my master.'

Few will the Baby's pleasures be. She will never have a Christmas tree, nor hang up her stocking, nor have other presents than a pair of mittens or a woolen kerchief for her head. The day before Christmas she will help her mother to scrub everything that can be scrubbed, indoors and out, working far into 'Jóla-Natt,' so that all shall be sweet and clean for the birthday of our Lord. And next morning, in the sod-roofed church where never was a fire made, she will sit with her mother on the women's side, waiting meekly after service until the last man and the last boy have left their seats. She will dance lightly on the sea-rocks, her fair hair blowing in the wind, retreating as the big waves crash down, and singing something which sounds like 'Ala kan eje taka mej!' (The wave cannot catch me!) She sings it to the same little tune I sang as a child when dancing back and forth across the danger-line of Taffy's land, mocking the rushes of an agile Taffy.

From seven to fourteen years she will go to school two weeks out of every six (the schoolmaster must be shared between three hamlets), and when fourteen years old, she will be confirmed, if she has learned enough Danish to pass the examinations and to say the prayers and creed. On that morning of confirmation she will turn up her hair, and wear a dress skirt that will flap about her little heels. And that afternoon there will be chocolate and cakes in her father's cabin, with friends coming and going.