Sang, a clergyman in a remote parish of Northern Norway, is famed
far and wide as the miracle-priest, and it is popularly believed that he
can work wonders, as the apostles did of old. He has given away his
large fortune to the poor; in a fervor of faith he plunges into every
danger, and comes out unscathed; he lives constantly in an overstrained
ecstasy, and by his mere presence, and the atmosphere which surrounds
him, forces his wife and children to live in the same state of high
nervous tension and unnatural abstraction from mundane reality and all
its concerns. His wife, Clara, who loves him ardently, is gradually worn
out by this perpetual strain, which involves a daily overdraft upon her
vitality; and finally the break comes, and she is paralyzed. For, like
everyone who comes in contact with Sang, she has had to live "beyond her
strength." She does not fully share her husband's faith, and though she
feels his influence and admires his lofty devotion, there is a
half-suppressed criticism in her mind. She feels the unwholesomeness of
thus "living by inspiration, and not by reason." When he comes to her,
"beaming always with a Sabbath joy," she would fain tune him down, if
she could, into a lower key, "the C-major of every-day life," as
Browning calls it. But in this effort she has had no success, for Sang's
ecstatic elevation above the concerns of earth is not only
temperamental; nature itself, in the extreme North, favors it. As Clara
expresses it:

"Nature here exceeds the limits of the ordinary. We have night nearly
all winter; we have day nearly all summer--and then the sun is above the
horizon, both day and night. Have you seen it in the night? Do you know
that behind the ocean vapors it often looks three or four times as large
as usual? And then the color-effects upon sky, sea, and mountain! From
the deepest glow of red to the finest, tenderest, golden white. And the
colors of the aurora upon the wintry sky!" etc.

It is the most ardent desire of Sang to heal his wife, as he has healed
many others. But the doubt in her mind baffles him, and for a long time
he is unsuccessful. At last, however, he resolves to make a mighty
effort--to besiege the Lord with his prayer, to wrestle with him, as
Jacob did of old, and not to release him, until he has granted his
petition. While he lies thus before the altar calling upon the Lord in
sacred rapture, a tremendous avalanche sweeps down the mountainside, but
divides, lea