When I was a boy about fourteen years old, I came one Saturday afternoon in the middle of the summer to Upper Lyse, the last farm in Sorkerdale. I had frequently walked or driven over the main road between Christiania and Ringerike, and I had now, after having been at home on a short visit, taken the road past Bokstad to Lyse for a change, with the intention of making a short cut through the north part of the Krog-wood.
I found all the doors of the farm-house wide open, but I looked in vain in the parlor, in the kitchen, and in the barn, for a human being whom I could ask for a drink and who could give me some direction about the road.
There was no one at home but a black cat, who was sitting quite content and purring on the hearth, and a dazzling white cock, who was walking up and down the passage breasting himself and crowing incessantly, as much as to say: "Now I am the cock of the walk!"
Tired with the heat and my walk, I threw myself down on the grass in the shadow of the house, where I lay half-asleep enjoying a quiet rest, when I was startled by an unpleasant clamour,—the jarring voice of a woman, who was trying by alternately scolding and using pet names to pacify a litter of grunting pigs on the farm. By following the sound I came upon a bare-footed old woman with a yellow dried-up countenance, who was bending down over the pigs' trough, busy filling it with food, for which the noisy little creatures were fighting, tearing, pushing, and yelling, with expectation and delight.
On my questioning her about the road, she answered me by asking me another question, while she, without raising herself up, turned her head half away from her pets to stare at me.
"Where might you come from?"
When she had got a satisfactory answer to this, she continued, while she repeatedly addressed herself to the young pigs:
"Ah, so!—you are at school at the parson's, eh!—hush, hush! little piggies, then!——The road to Stubdale, do you say?——Just look at that one now! Will you let the others get something as well, you rascal! Hush, hush! Be quiet, will you! Oh, poor fellow, did I kick you then?——Yes, yes, I'll tell you the road directly,—its—its straight on through the wood till you come to the big water-wheel!"
As this direction seemed to me to be rather vague for a road of about fourteen miles length through a forest, I asked her if I could not hire a lad who knew the road, to go with me.