ong the white snows reach
across the gently rolling plains as far as the eye can behold. In the
morning she sees them tinted pink at the east; at noon she notes
golden lights flashing across them; when the sky is gray--which is not
often--she notes that they grow as ashen as a face with the death shadow
on it. Sometimes they glitter with silver-like tips of ocean waves. But
at these things she looks only casually. It is when the blue shadows
dance on the snow that she leaves her corner behind the iron stove, and
stands before the window, resting her two hands on the stout bar of her
cane, and gazing out across the waste with eyes which age has restored
after four decades of decrepitude.

The young Icelandmen say:

"Mother, it is the clouds hurrying across the sky that make the dance of
the shadows."

"There are no clouds," she replies, and points to the jewel-like blue of
the arching sky.

"It is the drifting air," explains Fridrik Halldersson, he who has
been in the Northern seas. "As the wind buffets the air, it looks blue
against the white of the snow. 'Tis the air that makes the dancing
shadows."

But Urda shakes her head, and points with her dried finger, and
those who stand beside her see figures moving, and airy shapes, and
contortions of strange things, such as are seen in a beryl stone.

"But Urda Bjarnason," says Ingeborg Christianson, the pert young wife
with the blue-eyed twins, "why is it we see these things only when we
stand beside you and you help us to the sight?"

"Because," says the mother, with a steel-blue flash of her old eyes,
"having eyes ye will not see!" Then the men laugh. They like to hear
Ingeborg worsted. For did she not jilt two men from Gardar, and one from
Mountain, and another from Winnipeg?

Not even Ingeborg can deny that Mother Urda tells true things.

"To-day," says Urda, standing by the little window and watching the
dance of the shadows, "a child breathed thrice on a farm at the West,
and then it died."

The next week at the church gathering, when all the sledges stopped
at the house of Urda's granddaughter, they said it was so--that John
Christianson's wife Margaret never heard the voice of her son, but that
he breathed thrice in his nurse's arms and died.

"Three sledges run over the snow toward Milton," says Urda; "all are
laden with wheat, and in one is a stranger. He has with him a strange
engine, but its purpose I do not know."

Six hours later the drivers of