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Updated: May 19, 2025
And when are you coming up to see us at Sirilund, Lieutenant?" He introduced the little black-bearded man who was with him; a doctor, staying down near the church. The girl lifted her veil the least little bit, to her nose, and started talking to Asop in a whisper. I noticed her jacket; I could see from the lining and the buttonholes that it had been dyed.
I met reindeer Lapps, and they gave me cheese rich little cheeses tasting of herbs. I went up that way more than once. Then, going home again, I always shot some bird or other to put in my bag. I sat down and put Asop on the lead. Miles below me was the sea; the mountainsides were wet and black with the water running down them, dripping and trickling always with the same little sound.
"I love three things," I go on. "I love a dream of love I once had; I love you; and I love this spot of ground." "And which do you love most?" "The dream." All still again. Asop knows Eva; he lays his head on one side and looks at her. I murmur: "I saw a girl on the road to-day; she walked arm in arm with her lover. The girl looked towards me, and could scarcely keep from laughing as I passed."
The spring had reached me too, maybe, and my blood beat at times as if it were footsteps. I sat in the hut, and thought of overhauling my fishing rods and lines and gear, but moved never a finger to any work at all, for a glad, mysterious restlessness that was in and out of my heart all the while. Then suddenly Asop sprang up, stood and stiffened, and gave a short bark. Someone coming to the hut!
But Asop stands sniffing excitedly down towards the valley, pointing, and dragging at my clothes. When at last I get up and follow, he cannot get along fast enough. A flush of red shows in the sky above the woods. I go on faster; and there before my eyes is a glow, a huge fire. I stop and stare at it, go on a few steps and stare again. My hut is ablaze. The fire was Herr Mack's doing.
The magpies flew low along the ground, and when I came home and turned Asop loose he began eating the grass. The wind was beginning to rustle. A league below me is the sea. It is raining, and I am up in the hills. An overhanging rock shelters me from the rain. I smoke my pipe, smoke one pipe after another; and every time I light it, the tobacco curls up like little worms crawling from the ash.
In the night I heard Asop get up from his corner and growl; I heard it through my sleep, but I was dreaming just then of shooting, the growl of the dog fitted into the dream, and it did not wake me, quite. When I stepped out of the hut next morning there were tracks in the grass of a pair of human feet; someone had been there had gone first to one of my windows, then to the other.
Be still, Asop; I remember a strange saga story, of four generations ago, of Iselin's time, when Stamer was a priest. A girl sat captive in a stone tower. She loved a lord. Why? Ask the winds and the stars, ask the God of life, for there is none that knows such things. The lord was her friend and lover; but time went on, and one fine day he saw another and his liking changed.
To the next mortal man; to a huntsman in the woods. It was midnight. Asop had broken loose and been out hunting by himself; I heard him baying up in the hills, and when at last I got him back it was one o'clock. A girl came from herding goats; she fastened her stocking and hummed a tune and looked around. But where was her flock? And what was she doing in the woods at midnight?
Which as a wicked man durst scarce say, so think I, none so simple would say, that Asop lied in the tales of his beasts: for who thinks that Asop wrote it for actually true, were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of. What child is there, that coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?
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