There was a party of young people collected together at a country house about five kilometres outside the town. The garden they were sitting in down by the cove was brightly coloured by their light summer clothes, especially those of the girls: "Yellow, black, brown, white, Green, violet, blue," some self-coloured, others variegated, checks and stripes; felt hats, straw hats, tulle hats, caps, bare heads, parasols. A sound of singing rose harmoniously up out of this medley of colour; men's and women's voices in chorus floating in long undulating waves of sound. There was no conductor; a dark young girl in a brown checked dress lay in the midst of the group, leaning on one elbow, and led the singing with a soprano voice stronger and clearer than the others; and they followed her lead. They were in good practice. In the cove below them lay a freshly painted smack, with half rigged up new sails; the water calm as a mirror. The singing and the smack seemed brightly to enter into league with each other down in that black-looking cove, overshadowed and shut in by the bleak mountains with still higher ones in the distance. The little cove was like a mountain lake, once caused by a flood but since forgotten. The mountains--oh, so heavy and stunted in outline as in colour, rugged and leaden-looking, the more distant ones blue-black, with dirty snow on their peaks, monsters all of them. The smack lay on the black water, ready for a dance; it belonged to a more light-hearted community than these lofty accessories of nature and human life. The smack and the singing protested against all overweening despotism, all that was rude, rough, and coarse--a free swaying protest, proudly delighting in their colours. But the mountains took no notice of this protest, nor did the young people ever understand that it had been made. The "high-born" part of being born and bred in scenery like that of Norway's west country is just this, that nature forces one to make a stand, if one would not be utterly crushed and overwhelmed; either one must be beneath or above all! And they were above; for the west country folk are the brightest and cleverest of all Scandinavians. In so great a degree do they feel themselves masters of the situation as regards their scenery that not one of all these young people felt the mountains as heavy and cold in colour; all nature seemed to them fresh and strong, as nowhere else in the world.