. The thick-leaved maples and walnut-trees
which grew in random clusters about the walls seemed loftily conscious
of standing there for purposes of protection; for, wherever their
long-fingered branches happened to graze the roof, it was always with a
touch, light, graceful, and airily caressing. The irregularly paved yard
was inclosed on two sides by the main building, and on the third by
a species of log cabin, which, in Norway, is called a brew-house; but
toward the west the view was but slightly obscured by an elevated
pigeon cot and a clump of birches, through whose sparse leaves the
fjord beneath sent its rapid jets and gleams of light, and its strange
suggestions of distance, peace and unaccountable gladness.

Arnfinn Vording's career had presented that subtle combination of farce
and tragedy which most human lives are apt to be; and if the tragic
element had during his early years been preponderating, he was hardly
himself aware of it; for he had been too young at the death of his
parents to feel that keenness of grief which the same privation would
have given him at a later period of his life. It might have been
humiliating to confess it, but it was nevertheless true that the terror
he had once sustained on being pursued by a furious bull was much more
vivid in his memory than the vague wonder and depression which had
filled his mind at seeing his mother so suddenly stricken with age, as
she lay motionless in her white robes in the front parlor. Since then
his uncle, who was his guardian and nearest relative, had taken him into
his family, had instructed him with his own daughters, and finally sent
him to the University, leaving the little fortune which he had
inherited to accumulate for future use. Arnfinn had a painfully distinct
recollection of his early hardships in trying to acquire that soft
pronunciation of the r which is peculiar to the western fjord districts
of Norway, and which he admired so much in his cousins; for the
merry-eyed Inga, who was less scrupulous by a good deal than her older
sister, Augusta, had from the beginning persisted in interpreting their
relation of cousinship as an unbounded privilege on her part to ridicule
him for his personal peculiarities, and especially for his harsh r and
his broad eastern accent. Her ridicule was always very good-natured, to
be sure, but therefore no less annoying.

But--such is the perverseness of human nature--in spite of a series
of apparent rebuffs