all that fuss just to be wed and christened. Ay, outlying folks
had many troubles, great and small.

At last Oline did come....

And now they were wedded and christened, everything decently in order;
they had remembered to have the wedding first, so the child could be
christened as of a wedded pair. But the drought kept on, and the tiny
cornfields were parched, those velvet carpets parched--and why? 'Twas
all in the hand of God. Isak mowed his bits of meadow; there was
little grass on them for all he had manured them well that spring. He
mowed and mowed on the hillsides, farther and farther out; mowing and
turning and carting home loads of hay, as if he would never tire,--for
he had a horse already, and a well-stocked farm. But by mid-July he
had to cut the corn for green fodder, there was no help for it. And
now all depended on the potato crop.

What was that about potatoes? Were they just a thing from foreign
parts, like coffee; a luxury, an extra? Oh, the potato is a lordly
fruit; drought or downpour, it grows and grows all the same. It laughs
at the weather, and will stand anything; only deal kindly with it, and
it yields fifteen-fold again. Not the blood of a grape, but the flesh
of a chestnut, to be boiled or roasted, used in every way. A man may
lack corn to make bread, but give him potatoes and he will not starve.
Roast them in the embers, and there is supper; boil them in water, and
there's a breakfast ready. As for meat, it's little is needed beside.
Potatoes can be served with what you please; a dish of milk, a
herring, is enough. The rich eat them with butter; poor folk manage
with a tiny pinch of salt. Isak could make a feast of them on Sundays,
with a mess of cream from Goldenhorns' milk. Poor despised potato--a
blessed thing!

But now--things look black even for the potato crop.

Isak looked at the sky unnumbered times in the day. And the sky was
blue. Many an evening it looked as if a shower were coming. Isak would
go in and say, "Like as not we'll be getting that rain after all." And
a couple of hours later all would be as hopeless as before.

The drought had lasted seven weeks now, and the heat was serious;
the potatoes stood all the time in flower; flowering marvellously,
unnaturally. The cornfields looked from a distance as if under snow.
Where was it all to end? The almanac said nothing--almanacs nowadays
were not what they used to be; an almanac now was no good at all. Now
it looked like rai