three empty sledges stop at the house.

"We have been to Milton with wheat," they say, "and Christian Johnson
here, carried a photographer from St. Paul."

Now it stands to reason that the farmers like to amuse themselves
through the silent and white winters. And they prefer above all things
to talk or to listen, as has been the fashion of their race for a
thousand years. Among all the story-tellers there is none like Urda, for
she is the daughter and the granddaughter and the great-granddaughter
of storytellers. It is given to her to talk, as it is given to John
Thorlaksson to sing--he who sings so as his sledge flies over the snow
at night, that the people come out in the bitter air from their doors to
listen, and the dogs put up their noses and howl, not liking music.

In the little cabin of Peter Christianson, the husband of Urda's
granddaughter, it sometimes happens that twenty men will gather about
the stove. They hang their bear-skin coats on the wall, put their fur
gauntlets underneath the stove, where they will keep warm, and then
stretch their stout, felt-covered legs to the wood fire. The room is
fetid; the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her chair in
the warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who shake their
heads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow in sweet rhythm
from between her lips. Among the many, many tales she tells is that of
the dead weaver, and she tells it in the simplest language in all
the world--language so simple that even great scholars could find no
simpler, and the children crawling on the floor can understand.

"Jon and Loa lived with their father and mother far to the north of the
Island of Fire, and when the children looked from their windows they saw
only wild scaurs and jagged lava rocks, and a distant, deep gleam of the
sea. They caught the shine of the sea through an eye-shaped opening in
the rocks, and all the long night of winter it gleamed up at them, like
the eye of a dead witch. But when it sparkled and began to laugh, the
children danced about the hut and sang, for they knew the bright summer
time was at hand. Then their father fished, and their mother was gay.
But it is true that even in the winter and the darkness they were happy,
for they made fishing nets and baskets and cloth together,--Jon and Loa
and their father and mother,--and the children were taught to read in
the books, and were told the sagas, and given instruction in