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Updated: June 12, 2025
When it was about ten minutes of ten o'clock and time to be moving toward the churchyard, the Ashdales folk noticed that every one withdrew in the direction of the Där Nol home, which was only two minutes' walk from the church.
The son, accompanied by his wife and children, always drove down to the Ashdales over the steep and perilous mountain road once every summer, just to spend a day with his father.
The little girl had heard that some well-do-to people had offered the seine-maker a home for life, but in preference he had gone to live with his daughter-in-law, who made her home here in the Ashdales, so as to help her in any way that he could; she had many children, and her husband, who had deserted her, was now supposed to be dead.
Possibly some great personage was expected at the church, or maybe some clergyman other than the regular pastor was going to preach, thought the Ashdales folk, who lived in such an out-of-the-way corner that much could happen in the parish without their ever hearing of it. The mourners drove up to the cleared space behind the town hall, where they stepped down from the wagons.
The torches that had lighted the Ashdales folk through the woods were burned out when they came to the highroad; but here they went on, guided by the lights from peasant huts. When one house was out of sight, they glimpsed another in the distance, and every house along the road had candles burning at all the windows, to guide the poor wanderers on their way to church.
Jan left home in such haste that he had no time to think about the dreadful man he was going to see. But while passing through the groves of the Ashdales toward the big forest the old dread came over him. "It was mighty stupid in me not to have taken Glory Goldie along!" he said to himself.
By the middle of January it had grown so unbearably cold that snow had to be banked around all the little huts in the Ashdales as a protection against the elements, and every night the cows had to be covered with straw, to keep them from freezing to death. It was so cold that the bread froze; the cheese froze, and even the butter turned to ice. The fire itself seemed unable to hold its warmth.
The people from the Ashdales had left home at an surly hour, so as to reach the church ahead of those who drove thither. But when they were quite near the church grounds, sleighs, with foaming horses and jingling bells, went flying past, forcing the poor foot-farers to fake to the snow banks, at the edge of the road. Jan now carried the child.
So at five o'clock on Christmas Morn they all set out. It was pitch dark and cloudy, but not cold; in fact the air was almost balmy, and quite still, as it usually is toward the end of December. Before coming to an open highway, they had to walk along a narrow winding path, through fields and groves in the Ashdales, then take the steep winter-road across Snipa Ridge.
Along toward Christmas time Glory Goldie received word that her mother lay at the point of death. Then at last she tore herself away from the pier. She went home on foot, this being the best way to get to the Ashdales taking the old familiar road across Loby, then on through the big forest and over Snipa Ridge.
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