Puck — July 10, 1878 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

12 PUCK. fact, in the prescribed costume of his order. He scrambled to his feet, took off his hat, and scratched his head a little sheepishly. “Children will always be getting into mis- chief, unless they are amused,” he remarked in a deprecating tone. “Or unless they are at school, where they ought to be now. Come, chilren, run away to your lessons, or you will be late, and then what will the schoolmaster say to you? And, Nils, I think you might find a better use for your time than to bewilder these little ones with stories which they must sooner or later find out to be untrue.” Nils was silent for a few seconds, gazing somewhat ruefully after his dispersed flock, which was racing down the grass slopes towards the village. Then he turned his dreamy blue eyes upon the honest square face of his interlo- cutor, and said: “Fairy tales are not quite untrue—that is, there is more truth than falsehood in them. Yon must make truth pleasant to a child, or he will not care to understand it. If I tell him that beasts and birds talk together, what is the harm? It is not true, you say; and perhaps it is not—though that is a question which has never been decided, and never will be—but what is the child the worse for it? It may make him kinder to animals, and more careful of them—” “Yes, yes,” interrupted the priest a little impatiently; ‘that is all very well; but fairy tales are one thing, and religion is another; and we must be careful not to confuse them, my good Nils, lest we do wrong without intend- ing it. And, after all, these tales are best kept for the winter time, when there is less work to be done. You will never make your living, Nils, if you spend your days lying on the grass and inventing idle stories to amuse children.” This sounded rather hard upon Nils, who could and did get through as much work as any man in the country; but then, to be sure, the work he did was generally that which ought to have been done by other people, and was there- fore not of a remunerative kind; so that there was some justification for the priest’s predic- tion. Nils Jensen was probably the most shifty and helpful creature in the whole Hardanger dis- trict, as he assuredly was the least selfish. From the shoeing of a horse to the stringing of a fiddle, from the doctoring of a sick cow to the mending of a net, there was nothing within the limited range of the requirements of the inhabitants of Bakke that he could not do, and do well. He could fell timber with the best; he could build a shed; he could tinker up a leaking boat; he could cure a smoking chimney; and many other less every-day ac- complishments than these were his. Also his neighbors, recognizing in him the rare combi- nation of first-rate capacity with willingness to devote the same to the service of others, were not slow to take advantage thereof. If any one among them wanted the help of a strong pair of arms in his hay-field, or in the gather- ing in of his scanty rye-crop, or if he had a horse requiring medical treatment, or a gate that would not hang rightly on its hinges, or a lock out of repair, he never thought twice about what he should do, but called one of his children, and said: “Run as fast as thou canst up to old Chris- tian Jensen’s, and tell Nils he is wanted imme- diately.” And Nils seldom failed to respond to the ap- peal. He would perform the service required of him, whether it entailed the work of a few minutes or of the whole day, with the same placid cheerfulness, and the same perfect un- consciousness that he was duing anything out of the way, or specially deserving of gratitude. So little, indeed, did he expect to be thanked for his pains that his friends, falling in with his humor, as often as not neglected to go through that little formality. They were not, however, altogether ungrateful. Wherever Nils was known—and he was known many miles away from Bakke—he was loved; and that was a re- ward to which he was more sensible than to any form of thanks, whether spoken or acted. He was respected, too, as being a young man of exceptional literary attainments—a young man as well read as the schoolmaster, or per- haps the clergyman himself; though, mingled with this respect, there may have been a faint undercurrent of that half conscious contempt which would appear to be the natural human sentiment towards all unselfish and unbusiness- like men, and which is discoverable amung the secluded valleys of Norway as well as in less remote regions. The son of a farmer, who might be consid- ered almost well-to-do in that poverty-stricken land, Nils had the more leisure to attend to his neighbors’ affairs through being exempt from actual pressing necessity of looking after his own. He had his bed and board in the red wooden farmhouse where he lived with his fa- ther and his brothers; and, as he often said to those who reproved him for not making more money, what more can a man want than a roof to cover him, clothes to wear, and food to eat? He did his share of the farm work; but that was not much, for his elder brothers, Christian and Frants, were strong and healthy, and did not entirely share in his philanthropic views, holding a deeply-rooted, though inarti- culate belief in the maxim that charity begins at home. ‘They were very fond of Nils, these honest young men; but they, as well as their father, regarded him as an abnormal being, in- comprehensible to ordinary intelligences, and looked upon his example as one rather to be admired than to be imitated. His ideas, his tastes, his pursuits were in every respect at va- tiance with theirs. He was the best rifle-shot in the whole neighborhood, yet he never cared to measure his skill against that of another marksman; he never got drunk—no, not even at a wedding, and actually went so far as to contend that there was no real enjoyment to be got out of liquor—which was absurd upon the face of it. Then he took a strange and per- verse pleasure in long objectless wanderings among the snows and glaciers of the Fo'ge- fond, whereby nothing on earth was to be gained, except the risk of a broken neck; and would pass hours in sailing aimlessly about, up and down the fjord, neither fishing nor shoot- ing wild-duck, nor engaged in any sensible or profitable pursuit, but simply dreaming. ‘These things were a puzzle to the Jensen family, who, however, pardoned such vagaries in considera- tion of Nils’s usefulness and kind-heartedness, of his excellent playing upon the fiddle, and of the capital stones which he invented, or got out of his books, and related to them during the long dark winter days, while he sat over the fire, working at his wood-carving. For Nils was a proficient in this latter branch of in- dustry, and got a good price for his produc- tions from the Bergen dealers—which winnings, alas! he usually gave away very soon after he had received them. ‘This, again, was an in- comprehensible procedure to his relatives, who very reasonably asked what was the use of earn- ing money if you didn’t mean to keep it? Now ail this was very well, and Nils’s mode of life, being fashioned upon his own peculiar views, might have been the best possible for him, but for one unlucky circumstance— Nils was in love. For several years he had been the devoted slave of Dorothea (or, as she was more usually called, Dorthe) Aandahl, the daughter of the one general-shop keeper of Bakke, and the recognized beauty of the neigh- borhood. Nils worshiped this little fair- haired, blue-eyed maiden with all the fervor of a romantic nature, believing her to be the best and noblest, as she was obviously the most beautiful, girl in ‘all Norway, and mentally en- dowing her with many qualities which she not only did not possess, but would not even have understood the meaning of, if they had been mentioned to her. She was, in truth, a good, well-meaning little soul, not wholly unconscious of her pretty face, yet not unduly vain thereof, and sincerely attached to Nils, whom she ad- mired without having very much in common with him. They were betrothed with the con- sent of the parents on both sides; but there was no immediate prospect of their becoming man and wife, Nils’s father—a shrewd old per- son—having declined in the most unequivocal. manner to burden himself with the support of a third generation of Jensens, and Nils's own resources being wholly inadequate to the main- tenance of a household. But this uncertainty as to the future gave Nils very little disquietude. He had no doubt but that, some day or other, his marriage would take place; and in the meantime he was,satisfied with being allowed. to adore his idol, before whom he bowed down with as much reverence as any devout Catholic before his patron saint, loading her with votive-offerings in the shape of bear-skins and fox.skins, the spoil of his rifle, with wood- carvings, the product of many a winter day’s work, with quaintsilver ornaments from Bergen, anc with | know not what other treasures picked up here and there in the course of his circum- scribed wanderings. He wrote verses, too, in her honor, and composed long histories, for the delectation of the neighbors during the idle season of the year, in which the heroine always had fair hair and blue eyes, and invariably bor: the name of Dorthe. But if such philandering contented the ro- mantic Nils, there were other more practical people to whom it appeared the height of folly and shortsightedness, and who often felt it their duty to point out to the patient lover that this way of going on could not last for ever, and that a man who proposed to take unto himself a wife had best be setting about making ready a home for her, instead of spending his money and his labor upon those with whom he had no blood-relationship at all. Advice of this de- scription usually caused Nils to scratch his head and ponder for a time; for, really, there did seem to be a good deal of sound sense in it; and the customary effect was produced by the warning words of the priest recorded above. But, after a minute or two, Nils, recollecting that he had promised to sail across the fjord to Utne, with Hans Lundgren, who was old and rheumatic, and no longer able to manage his boat single-handed, dismissed the subject from lis mind, and set off to run down to the port as fast as his long legs could carry him. Some children, playing in the street, caught sight of him as he passed, and gave chase, call- ing out, ‘ Nils! Nils!’ but he shook his head and waved his hand, and never paused till he had reached the sandy shore, where a few fishing-crafts were drawn up. There, sitting in one of the boats, and mending a net, he found an old man, the sight of whom would have gladdened an artist's eye, so very old was he— so wrinkled, so dirty, and so picturesque. He wore woolen stockings and knee-breeches, and a blue jacket, which was patched and ancient, but which boasted of real silver buttons. On his head he had a scarlet nightcap, and his silvery hair was combed forward into two long locks, which hung down beside his withered cheeks. He looked up, as Nils approached, and said, in a querulous piping voice: “Oh, you have come, then?” “Yes,” said Nils, jumping into the boat as he shoved it off. ‘*1 am sorry to have kept you waiting, Hans.”