The old mistress and he were married six-and-forty years, and the last thirty years of their union all was serene; there was no happier couple in the world. * * * * * The little children lay in their beds listening and delighting. Until then their grandfather had been to them no more than a wooden image, and now all at once he had come alive. VIII THE MILITIA-MEN IT HAPPENED in the year 1810, when Grandmother Lagerlöf was a young wife and the mother of two little children. She sat one evening by the east window of the kitchen-bedroom; dusk had fallen and ’twas too dark to see to sew. Being well on in March the tallow dips were about used up, so she had taken up her knitting, for her knitting needles she could ply in the deepest darkness. All at once something made her look out. She could hardly believe her eyes! But a little while before it had been fine clear weather, and now there was a blinding snowstorm. The air was so thick with snow she could barely distinguish the firelight from the window of the manservants’ hall directly opposite. The lashing wind swished the snow against the house, and in just the short time she had been sitting there the drifts had piled so high that bushes and fences were buried under them. Darkness had descended quickly with the coming of the storm, yet she descried several large animals stalking through the drifts toward the farmyard. “I hope the maids will be mindful, and not go out for firewood,” she said to herself, “for the _graylegs_ are out to-night.” Shortly afterwards she heard a piercing cry and saw a wolf lumber past her window with something in its mouth that struggled and fought. She thought it looked like a child. But whose child could it be? Her own little ones were right beside her, and there were no other children on the farm. Close behind the first wolf came another; it, too, had a child in its gape. Grandmother couldn’t sit still any longer. She jumped up so suddenly she knocked over the chair, and rushed through the kitchen out into the yard.... Then she stood stock still. Before her was the calm, beautiful spring evening; not a sign of snow--not a wolf in sight. She must have fallen asleep over her knitting, she thought, and been dreaming. Yet she felt that back of it all lay something serious. “We’ll have to take precious good care of the little ones,” she said to the maids. “That was no dream, it was a warning.” However, the children thrived and waxed fat and rosy. The dream, or vision, or whatever it was, soon passed out of mind, like much else of the same sort. Along in August a company of poor soldiers came to Mårbacka. The men were ragged, famished, and ill. Their bodies were nothing but skin-and-bone and in their eyes was the look of the ravening wolf. The mark of death was on them all.