he would have written in her book, and perhaps
much else as beautiful and wonderful. Who knows? Only one thing we
know, that books are forgotten, but such a life as hers never is.

The old prophetess's eyes closed and she sank into visions.

Her body struggled with death, but she did not know it. Her family
sat weeping about her deathbed, but she did not see them. Her
spirit had begun its flight.

Dreams became reality to her and reality dreams. Now she stood, as
she had already seen herself in the visions of her youth, waiting
at the gates of heaven with innumerable hosts of the dead round
about her. And heaven opened. He, the only one, the Saviour, stood
in its open gates. And his infinite love woke in the waiting
spirits and in her a longing to fly to his embrace, and their
longing lifted them and her, and they floated as if on wings
upwards, upwards.

The next day there was mourning in the land; mourning in wide parts
of the earth.

_Fredrika Bremer was dead._

THE ROMANCE OF A FISHERMAN'S WIFE

On the outer edge of the fishing-village stood a little cottage on
a low mound of white sea sand. It was not built in line with the
even, neat, conventional houses that enclosed the wide green place
where the brown fish-nets were dried, but seemed as if forced out
of the row and pushed on one side to the sand-hills. The poor widow
who had erected it had been her own builder, and she had made the
walls of her cottage lower than those of all the other cottages and
its steep thatched roof higher than any other roof in the fishing-village.
The floor lay deep down in the ground. The window was neither high
nor wide, but nevertheless it reached from the cornice to the level
of the earth. There had been no space for a chimney-breast in the
one narrow room and she had been obliged to add a small, square
projection. The cottage had not, like the other cottages, its
fenced-in garden with gooseberry bushes and twining morning-glories
and elder-bushes half suffocated by burdocks. Of all the vegetation
of the fishing-village, only the burdocks had followed the cottage
to the sand-hill. They were fine enough in summer with their fresh,
dark-green leaves and prickly baskets filled with bright, red
flowers. But towards the autumn, when the prickles had hardened and
the seeds had ripened, they grew careless about their looks, and
stood hideously ugly and dry with their torn leaves wrapped in a
melancholy shroud of dusty cobwebs