glanced sharply from the side, at the stranger lady who had alighted, and made her way between the goats to where his daughter was standing. It was impossible, for the noise of the cattle, dogs, and bells, to hear what they were saying, but now both the ladies were looking at him, and with the goats around them they came towards the step. The herdsman, on a sign from the dean, began to drive the cattle away. Signe, his daughter, called out: (Petra was struck with the harmony of her voice,) "Father, here is a lady travelling, who would like to rest a day with us."--"She shall be welcome!" cried the dean in reply, gave the dish to the lad, and went into his study, in the right wing of the house, apparently to tidy himself. Petra followed the young lady into the passage, which was more properly a hall, it was so light and broad; the driver boy was dismissed, her things carried in, and she herself shewn into a side room opposite the study, where she took off her things, and went out again into the passage, to be further shewn into the dining room. What a large light room! Nearly the whole wall fronting the garden was windows, the middle one opened as a door to the garden. The windows were broad and high, reaching almost to the floor, and they were full of flowers, plants stood upon stands here and there in the room, and instead of curtains was interwoven ivy, hanging from two small hedges of flowers up in the frame above. As there were bushes and flowers on every side, growing up the walls, and on the greensward before her, it seemed like a conservatory in the midst of the garden; and yet one had not been a minute in the room, before the flowers were no longer seen; for the church standing by itself on a hill to the right was what one saw,--the blue waters reflecting its image, coursed sparkling on so far away between the mountains that one could not tell whether it was a lake, or an arm of the sea curving in. And then the mountains themselves! Not single, but chains of mountains, each one rearing its mighty front behind the other, as if the boundary of the world.