Then a hard heart melted, and tears rolled down the man’s cheeks as he clung to his wife’s hand.
Now he talked to her as to his own soul. Now too she opened her mind to him. They also talked about how all this had happened, or rather he listened while she told about it. Knud Aakre had been the first to see the fire, had roused his people, sent the girls out over his parish, while he had hastened himself with men and horses to the scene of the conflagration, where all were sleeping. He had engineered the extinguishing of the flames and the rescuing of the household goods, and had himself dragged Lars from the burning room, and carried him to the left side of the house from whence the wind was blowing and had laid him out here in the churchyard.
And while they were talking of this, some one came driving rapidly up the road and turned into the churchyard, where he alighted. It was Knud, who had been home after his church-cart—the one in which they had so many times ridden together to and from the meetings of the parish board. Now he requested Lars to get in and ride home with him. They grasped each other by the hand, the one sitting, the other standing.
“Come with me now,” said Knud.
Without a word of reply, Lars rose. Side by side they walked to the cart. Lars was helped in; Knud sat down beside him. What they talked about as they drove along, or afterward in the little chamber at Aakre, where they remained until late in the morning, has never been known. But from that day they were inseparable as before.
As soon as misfortune overtakes a man, every one learns what he is worth. And so the parish undertook to rebuild Lars Högstad’s houses, and to make them larger and handsomer than any others in the valley. He was reelected chairman, but with Knud Aakre at his side; he never again failed to take counsel of Knud’s intelligence and heart—and from that day forth nothing went to ruin.
BJÖRN SIVERTSEN’S WEDDING TRIP
BY HOLGER DRACHMANN
By general consent Drachmann fills a niche in the temple of fame as introducer of the modern “short story” into Denmark. He was born at Copenhagen in 1846, and is a man of extraordinary versatility both in accomplishment and temperament. Besides being a marine painter of some note, and, before he joined with the conservative party of thinkers in 1880, the most conspicuous of the new realistic school of writers in Denmark, he has been at various times royalist, socialist, realist, romanticist, radical, orthodox, national, cosmopolitan.