and depending
shoots completed the mourning garments of those solemn heights.

Each household gathered in its chimney-corner, in houses carefully
closed from the outer air, and well supplied with biscuit, melted
butter, dried fish, and other provisions laid in for the seven-months
winter. The very smoke of these dwellings was hardly seen, half-hidden
as they were beneath the snow, against the weight of which they were
protected by long planks reaching from the roof and fastened at some
distance to solid blocks on the ground, forming a covered way around
each building.

During these terrible winter months the women spun and dyed the woollen
stuffs and the linen fabrics with which they clothed their families,
while the men read, or fell into those endless meditations which have
given birth to so many profound theories, to the mystic dreams of the
North, to its beliefs, to its studies (so full and so complete in one
science, at least, sounded as with a plummet), to its manners and its
morals, half-monastic, which force the soul to react and feed upon
itself and make the Norwegian peasant a being apart among the peoples of
Europe.

Such was the condition of the Strom-fiord in the first year of the
nineteenth century and about the middle of the month of May.

On a morning when the sun burst forth upon this landscape, lighting the
fires of the ephemeral diamonds produced by crystallizations of the snow
and ice, two beings crossed the fiord and flew along the base of the
Falberg, rising thence from ledge to ledge toward the summit. What were
they? human creatures, or two arrows? They might have been taken for
eider-ducks sailing in consort before the wind. Not the boldest hunter
nor the most superstitious fisherman would have attributed to human
beings the power to move safely along the slender lines traced beneath
the snow by the granite ledges, where yet this couple glided with the
terrifying dexterity of somnambulists who, forgetting their own weight
and the dangers of the slightest deviation, hurry along a ridge-pole and
keep their equilibrium by the power of some mysterious force.

"Stop me, Seraphitus," said a pale young girl, "and let me breathe. I
look at you, you only, while scaling these walls of the gulf; otherwise,
what would become of me? I am such a feeble creature. Do I tire you?"

"No," said the being on whose arm she leaned. "But let us go on, Minna;
the place where we are is not firm enough to stand on