There is a Christmas Fair on, too, and I stroll along to see. Here are skis and toboggans, butter scoops and log chairs from the underworld, rose-coloured mittens, clothes' rollers, foxes' skins. And here are horse-dealers and drovers mingling with drunken folk from up the valley. Jews there are, too, anxious to palm off a gaudy watch or so, for all there is no money in the town. And the watches come from that country up in the Alps, where Bocklin--did not come from; where nothing and nobody ever came from. But in the evening there is brave entertainment for all. Two dancing-halls there are, and the music is supplied by masters on the _hardingfele,_ and wonderful music it is, to be sure. There are iron strings to it, and it utters no empty phrases, but music with a sting in its tail. It acts differently upon different people: some find it rich in national sweetness; some of us are rather constrained to grit our teeth and howl in melancholy wise. Never was stinging music delivered with more effect. The dance goes on. In one of the intervals the schoolmaster sings touching verses about an “aged mother, worn with toil And sweating as 'twere blood....” But some of the wild youths insist on dancing and nothing else. What's this! Start singing, when they're standing here with the girls all ready to dance--it's not proper! The singer stops, and meets the protest in broadest dialect: What? Not proper? Why, it's by Vinje himself! Heated discussion, _pro_ and _contra,_ arguing and shouting. Never were verses sung with more effect. The dance goes on. The girls from the valley are armoured five layers thick, but who cares for that! All are used to hard work. And the dance goes on--ay, the thunder goes on. _Brændevin_ helps things bravely along. The witches' cauldron is fairly steaming now. At three in the morning the local police force appears, and knocks on the floor with his stick. _Finis._ The dancers go off in the moonlight, and spread out near and far. And nine months later, the girls from the valley show proof that after all they were one layer of armour short. Never was such an effect of being one layer short. The river is quieter now--not much of a river to look at: the winter is come upon it now. It drives the mills and works that stand on its banks, for, in spite of all, it is and will be a great river still, but it shows no life. It has shut down the lid on itself. And the rapids have suffered, too. And I who stood watching them once and listening, and thought to myself if one lived down there in the roar of it for ever, what would one's brain be like at last? But now the rapids are dwindled, and murmur faintly. It would be shame to call it a roar. _Herregud!_ 'tis no more than a ruin of what it was. Sunk into poverty, great rocks thrust up all down the channel, with here and there a stick of timber hung up thwart and slantwise; one could cross dry-shod by way of stick and stone. * * * * *