to break this clause, the inhabitants of the town never felt themselves welcome on his property. At all events they kept at a respectful distance from his house and garden. Even we boys, who hated to forego a pirate's raid on an orchard, allowed the miller's famous apples and pears to ripen in peace. In the town there was also circulated several malicious rumours about the miller. It was said that he treated with tyrannical harshness his beautiful young wife, a farmer's daughter from the south. Perhaps the rumours merely arose from the fact that the miller's wife lived as isolated a life as her husband, a state of affairs the hospitable and sociable townspeople could not believe to be of her own free choice. At all events the rumours did not grow less unkind when the young wife died some few months after the birth of her first baby, leaving her husband a little daughter who had no nurse or maid to look after her, but was taken care of by the miller and his boy. The little girl, an object for the town's pity, was about two or three years old when we went away. With shy curiosity I had often watched the little girl when, in the simple cart, a rough, wooden box on four wheels, she was pulled round the banks of the mill by the old, half-deformed miller's boy.
Each day I have been for a walk round the mill. We have had storms from the west. I have enjoyed the grand view of the fjord in revolt, and I have, when the storm subsided, listened
