ot angry with S. either."

The next day Susanna was standing by the fence in the garden when I
passed, but pretended not to see me; she probably repented having been
so ready to make advances.

Although outwardly their relations were polite in the extreme, in
reality my father's intercourse with the minister was from this time
broken off; they never, except on special occasions and in response to a
solemn invitation, set foot within one another's door. This again gave a
kind of clandestine character to the intercourse between me and Susanna.
No command was laid upon us, yet we only met, as it were, by stealth.

We were both lonely children. Susanna sat at home, a prisoner to
every-day tediousness, under her mother's watchful eye, and in my dreary
home I always had a feeling of cold and fright, and as if all gladness
were over with Susanna at the parsonage. It was therefore not surprising
that we were always longing to be together.

As we grew older, opportunities were less frequent, but the longing only
became the greater by being repressed, and the moments we could spend
together gradually acquired, unknown to us, another than the old
childish character. To talk to her had now become a solace to me, and
many a day I haunted the parsonage lands, only to get a glimpse of her.

I was about sixteen, when one morning, as I passed the parsonage garden,
she beckoned to me, and handed me a flower over the wall, and then she
hastily ran in, right across the carrot beds, as if she were afraid some
one would see.

It was the first time it had struck me how beautiful she was, and for
many a day I thought of her as she stood there in the garden among the
bushes with the morning sun shining down upon her.

CHAPTER III

_THE SERVANTS' HALL_

The ghostly spirit which ran through our house, first had free outlet
down in the servants' hall, when the men and maids, and the wayfarers
who were putting up for the night, sat in the evening in the red glow
from the stove, and told all kinds of tales about shipwrecks and ghosts.

On the bench in the space between the stove and the wall, sat the
strong, handsome man Jens with his carpentering and repairs; he used to
do his work, and listen in silence to the others. By the stove
"Komag-Nils" busied himself with greasing komags [Komag--a peculiar kind
of leather boot used by the Fins.] or skins--he had this name, because
he made komags. Komag-Nils was a little fellow, with unti