"The Wind-wife[2]--Mother Elle, who used to sell wind to the sailors--the Finnish woman from Stavanger. She has gathered up a lot of children who have no one to look after them and is leading them into the mountains. She has Nikolina Sven's daughter Larsson, and Olof and Anders Amundson, and half a score of younger ones from different villages. She says that if it is God's will for the plague to come to the saeter it will come, but it is not there now, and it is in the valleys and the towns. She has gone on with the small ones who cannot walk fast, and left Olof and Anders and me to bring along the ponies with the loads. I'll help you drive your beasts." Without trouble the lads got the animals out of the byres and headed them up the road. Norway is so sharply divided by precipitous mountain ranges and deeply-penetrating fiords, that it may be but a few miles from a farm near sea level to the high grassy pastures three or four thousand feet above it where the cattle are pastured in summer. The saeter maidens live there in their cottages from June to September, making butter and cheese, tending the herds and doing such other work as they can. The saeter belonging to Ormgard and its neighbors was the one chosen by Mother Elle as a refuge for her flock. The forest of magnificent firs through which the road passed presently grew less somber, beginning to be streaked with white birches whose bright leaves twinkled in the sun. Then it reached the height at which evergreens cease to grow. The birches were shorter and sparser, and through the thinning woodland appeared glimpses of a treeless pasture dotted with scrubby low bushes and clumps of rushes. A glint of clear green water betrayed a small lake in a dip of the hills. And now were heard sounds most unusual in that lonely place, the high sweet voices of children. Birch trees, little trees, dwarfed by sharp winds and poor soil, encircled a level space perhaps ten feet across, carpeted with new soft grass, reindeer moss and cupped lichens. Here sat seven or eight children eagerly listening to a story told by an older child as she divided the ration of fladbrod,[3] wild strawberries from a small basket of birchbark, and brown goat's-milk cheese. "And Freya came from Asgard in her chariot drawn by two cats--"