I saw my mother. Heaven's bliss still lay on the stiff, stark visage. The load was gone from my heart, relieved and comforted; I looked upon the dear features as though I were contemplating a white flower. It was no longer the poor, sick, weary woman that lay before me: it was the face lit up with a ray from the youthful days long past. She lay there slumbering and was strong and well. She was young again and white and gentle; she wore a little smile, as she often did when she looked at the merry little fellow playing about with his toys at her feet. The dark and glossy hair (she had no grey hairs yet) was carefully braided and peeped out a little at the temples from under the brown kerchief, the one which she loved best to wear upon her head when she went to church on holidays. She held her hands folded over her breast, with the rosary and the wax candle between them. She lay there just as though she had fallen asleep in church on Whit Sunday, during the solemn High Mass; and thus, even in death, she comforted her child. But the rough hands clearly showed that the slumberer had led a hard and toilful life. And so you stood before this sacred image, nearly as still and motionless as the sleeper. At last, you whispered to your little sister, who stood softly weeping by your side: "Who closed her eyes?" A sound of hammering came from the parlour. The carpenter was knocking together the last dwelling-house. After a while, Maria drew the shroud over the head again, as softly and carefully as when she used to cover up our little mother, hundreds and hundreds of times, in the long period of sickness. Then I went into the small, warm parlour. Father, my elder sister, my two brothers, of whom the younger was still a boy, came up to me with mournful looks. They hardly spoke a word, they gave me their hands, all but the little fellow, who hid himself in the chimney-corner, where we could hear his sobbing. Joseph the carpenter was calmly planing away at the coffin, which he had now finished joining, and smoked his pipe as he did so. Later, when the afternoon shadows had lengthened outside, far over the glittering snow-clad meadow-land, when, in the parlour, Joseph was painting the black cross on the coffin-lid, father sat down beside it and said, softly: "Please God, after all, she has a house of her own again." On the first day after mother's death, no fire had been lit on the cottage-hearth. One and all had forgotten that a mortal man wants a basin of hot soup in the morning and at mid-day. On the other hand, a blazing fire had been kindled on the field behind the little house, to burn the straw bedding on which she had died, even as, long ago, the forefathers had fanned their Odin fires, commending the beloved dead to the Goddess Hella, the great concealer.[21]