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Updated: May 29, 2025
Then, as if to excuse herself, she added quickly, "Kjersti wanted me to." "What is your name?" "Lisbeth; and Jacob calls me Longfrock." "Where are you from?" "From Peerout." "Are you Jacob Peerout's sister? We went to school with him last winter." "Yes, I am." "What a nuisance that Jacob himself did not come! We haven't any use at all for young ones like you up here."
All the people came back with them to Peerout Castle, Kjersti Hoel, too. Kari Svehaugen, who had not gone to the church, had covered the table with a white tablecloth, and set it with plates and good things to eat. And all the people ate and talked, but they did not talk very loudly. When the meal was over, Lisbeth got Jacob to go out into the cow house to look at Crookhorn.
In the spring before the last a message had come from Nordrum Farm that a boy was needed to look after the flocks, and Jacob had at once applied and been accepted. He and Lisbeth had often knelt on the long wooden bench under the little window at Peerout Castle, and gazed upon the different farms, choosing which they would work on when they were big enough.
And oh, how many curious things Kjersti showed her! The cow house was the finest of them all. There were so many cows that Lisbeth could scarcely count them. And then the pigs and sheep and goats! and hens, too, inside a big latticework inclosure, nearly as many of them as there were crows in autumn up at Peerout!
But when she had passed through the gate that last day, and had stopped and looked back, the picture that she then saw had brought the whole clearly before her, with all its sorrow. Something was gone that would never come again. She would never again go to Peerout Castle except as a stranger. She had no home no home anywhere.
Here and there in the farmhouses across the valley could be seen a man leaning against the frame of the doorway, bareheaded, and in shirt sleeves as white as the driven snow. From all the chimneys smoke was slowly arising in the still air. Lisbeth looked involuntarily up at Peerout Castle. There everything appeared gray and desolate.
In the morning Lisbeth's mother woke her and told her to get up and go over to Kari Svehaugen's and ask Kari to come to Peerout Castle. Randi felt so poorly that there was no use in her even trying to get up. She was not able. Not able to get up! That also seemed very strange to Lisbeth, for never before had she seen her mother with cheeks so red and eyes so shining.
Peerout Castle was perched high above the Upper Farms, on a crag that jutted out from a barren ridge just under a mountain peak called "The Big Hammer." The real name of the little farm was New Ridge, and "Peerout Castle" was only a nickname given to it by a joker because there was so fine an outlook from it and because it bore no resemblance whatever to a castle.
The goat was larger than most goats, about as large as a good-sized calf. If the cows belonging to Hoel Farm were as much larger than ordinary cows, thought Lisbeth, they would be able to eat grass from the roof of Peerout Castle while standing, just as usual, on the ground. She glanced searchingly at the cow-house door.
Lisbeth's second working day, like her first, seemed a very long one, for the forest was wonderfully lonesome and still. The little girl had time to think of many, many things, of her mother and Jacob and Peerout Castle; and it must be acknowledged that she cried a wee bit, too. Upward over the open slope across the valley from Hoel Farm a lengthy procession was taking its way.
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