But hark! a huge
stone rolls down over the mountain-side, then another, and another; the
noise grows, the birches down there in the gorge tremble and shake.
Aasa leaned out over the brink of the ravine, and, as far as she could
distinguish anything from her dizzying height, thought she saw something
gray creeping slowly up the neck-breaking mountain path; she watched
it for a while, but as it seemed to advance no farther she again took
refuge in her reveries. An hour might have passed, or perhaps more, when
suddenly she heard a noise only a few feet distant, and, again stooping
out over the brink, saw the figure of a man struggling desperately to
climb the last great ledge of the rock. With both his hands he clung to
a little birch-tree which stretched its slender arms down over the black
wall, but with every moment that passed seemed less likely to accomplish
the feat. The girl for a while stood watching him with unfeigned
curiosity, then, suddenly reminding herself that the situation to him
must be a dangerous one, seized hold of a tree that grew near the brink,
and leaned out over the rock to give him her assistance. He eagerly
grasped her extended hand, and with a vigorous pull she flung him up
on the grassy level, where he remained lying for a minute or two,
apparently utterly unable to account for his sudden ascent, and gazing
around him with a half-frightened, half-bewildered look. Aasa, to whom
his appearance was no less strange than his demeanor, unluckily hit
upon the idea that perhaps her rather violent treatment had momentarily
stunned him, and when, as answer to her sympathizing question if he was
hurt, the stranger abruptly rose to his feet and towered up before her
to the formidable height of six feet four or five, she could no longer
master her mirth, but burst out into a most vehement fit of laughter.
He stood calm and silent, and looked at her with a timid but strangely
bitter smile. He was so very different from any man she had ever seen
before; therefore she laughed, not necessarily because he amused her,
but because his whole person was a surprise to her; and there he stood,
tall and gaunt and timid, and said not a word, only gazed and gazed. His
dress was not the national costume of the valley, neither was it like
anything that Aasa had ever known. On his head he wore a cap that hung
all on one side, and was decorated with a long, heavy silk tassel. A
threadbare coat, which seemed to be made expressl