n-fish. Cans of Hardanger ale
were not wanting; and a young girl, with light plaited hair,
light-yellow leather jacket, black thickly-plaited petticoat, and a red
kerchief tied round her neck, with a face as pretty and innocent as ever
an idyl bestowed upon its shepherdess, waited upon the guests, and
entertained them with her simple, good-humoured talk.

After breakfast the journey was continued. Upon the heights of Ustefjell
they saw two vast mountain ranges, whose wavy backs reared themselves
into the regions of perpetual snow. They were Hallingskarv and
Halling-Jokul.

Slowly advanced the caravan up the Barfjell. By degrees all trees
disappeared; the ground was naked, or only covered by low black bushes;
between, lay patches of snow-lichen, which increased in extent the
higher they ascended. The prospect around had in it something
indescribably cold and terrific. But Susanna felt herself in a peculiar
manner enlivened by this wild, and to her new spectacle. To this the old
Halling peasant contributed, who, whilst they travelled through this
desolate mountain track, related to the party various particulars of the
"subterranean folk" who dwelt there, and whom he described as a spectre
herd, with little, ugly, pale, or bluish human shapes, dotted in grey,
and with black head-gear. "They often draw," said he, "people down into
their subterranean dwellings, and there murder them; and if anybody
escape living out of their power, they remain from that time through
the whole of their lives dejected and insane, and have no more pleasure
on the earth. Certain people they persecute; but to others they afford
protection, and bring to them wealth and good fortune." The Halling
peasant was himself perfectly convinced of the actual existence of these
beings; he had himself seen in a mountain district a man who hastily
sunk into the earth and vanished!

One of his friends had once seen in a wood a whole farm, with house,
people, and cattle; but when he reached the place, all these had
immediately vanished.

Harald declared that here the imagination had played its pranks well;
but the old man endeavoured to strengthen the affair by relating the
following piece out of Hans Lauridsen's "Book of the Soul."

"The devil has many companions; such as elfin-women, elfin-men, dwarfs,
imps, nightmares, hobgoblins with red-hot fire-tongs, Var-wolves,
giants, spectres, which appear to people when they are about to die."

And as Harald sm