Leonard had almost wholly forgotten his fisherman. But now he noted that the old man stood steadily beside him at the rampart. His face appeared smaller than before in the moonlight. Despite the two-story nose and the gray stubble it was almost like a child’s. But it had always the same stamp of repose. It peered out into the spring night, as if all this illimitable canopy was a friendly home for brisk old folks. Naturally, thought Leonard, the whole world is for him just a beautiful dream of once on a time. The moon, the trees, and the rushing water here, all are his memory, all have flowed into a great certitude, all are his innermost self, as memories are. Leonard gave the old man his hand: “Thanks for your help!” he said. “Aye, thanks and good-bye, then. Now I must down there again a bit, I suppose. Fishing is best at night.” Thereupon Lundstrom went to his net. But Leonard strolled without uncertainty or restlessness up to his den on the crest of South Stockholm. His thoughts played meanwhile with the same daring little speech: Why should infinity make us homeless? he said to himself. Infinity has its middle point somewhere. Well, and I, woodcut artist Leonard, am sitting in the centre. Should I not then with a good heart cut at my boxwood blocks? STORIES BY VERNER VON HEIDENSTAM WHEN THE BELLS RING In southern Småland, just where the stony road to Scania branches into several village paths and a muddy slope leads up to the parish church, there stood a mill, painted red and with the largest wings that anyone had ever seen in all that region. The miller was dead long since. His widow, named Kerstin Bure, a woman who in her childhood had seen happier days and eaten from shining plates of pewter, managed the mill after her own fashion. She never made mention of her birth or of the love-dealings that had enticed her from a well-to-do pastor’s home to the narrow tower-room of a miller, where the axle-beam groaned directly over her sleeping-place; but then she did not speak of other things either. The husband had been too poor to possess a cottage of his own and had instead built a chimney straight through the roof of the mill. There year after year, with her sewing in her hand, the wife had silently continued to watch the work of the men. If at any time she was asked for advice, she answered preferably with a nod or a shake of the head, and she seldom went away further than a stone’s throw from the mill. In figure she was tall and slim with delicate hands, and her face under the starched cap, which was always of the same invariable whiteness, reminded one of Mary Magdalen’s on the picture at the altar, though it was more yellowed and shrunken. She never took women into her service, and so women in particular accustomed themselves to passing her in silence. They did not rightly know whether she was proud or meek, but most of them thought that she might well be both. When the sexton