uld not flap his wings. After a short
time everything was so dirty and ill-smelling and unhealthy that
Klooskap had to go back and untie one wing, and let the wind blow to
clear the air and make the earth once more wholesome.

Wild apples fell, grain ripened, nights lengthened. Long ago the
twin-flower, violet, wild pansy, forget-me-not and yellow anemone had
left their fairy haunts, and there remained only the curving fantastic
fronds of the fern,--the dragon-grass. Then had come brilliant spots and
splashes of color on the summer slopes--purple butterwort, golden
ragweed, aconite, buttercup, deep crimson mossy patches of saxifrage,
rosy heather, catchfly, wild geranium, cinnamon rose. These also
finished their triumphal procession and went to their Valhalla. Then one
September morning the children woke to hear the wind screaming as if the
White Eagle had escaped his prison, and the rain pelting the world.

All summer they had been out, rain or shine, like water-ouzels, but now
they were glad to sit about the fire with the shutters all closed, and
the smoke now and then driven down into the room by the storm. Before
evening the little ones were begging for stories.

"I wish I could remember a saga I heard last Yule," Nikolina said at
last. "It was about a voyage the Vikings made to a country where the
people had never seen cattle. When they heard the cattle bellowing they
all ran away and left the furs they had come to sell."

"Tell all you remember and make up the rest," suggested Karen, but
Nikolina shook her head.

"One should never do that with a saga."

"I know that tale," spoke up Thorolf suddenly, although he had never in
his life repeated a saga. "Grandmother used to tell it. In the beginning
Bjarni Heriulfson the sea-rover, after many years came home to Iceland
to drink wassail in his father's house. But strangers dwelt there and
told him that his father was gone to Greenland, and he set sail for that
land. Soon was the ship swallowed up in a gray mist in which were
neither sun nor stars. They sailed many days they knew not where, but
suddenly the fog lifted and the sun revealed to them a coast of low
hills covered with forest. By this Bjarni thought that it was not
Greenland but some southerly coast. Therefore turned he northward and
sailed many days before he sighted the mountains of Greenland and his
father's house.

"Years afterward returned Bjarni to Iceland, and in his telling of that
voyage it c