Then had come brilliant spots and
splashes of color on the summer slopes--purple butterwort, golden
ragweed, aconite, buttercup, deep crimson mossy patches of saxifrage,
rosy heather, catchfly, wild geranium, cinnamon rose. These also
finished their triumphal procession and went to their Valhalla. Then one
September morning the children woke to hear the wind screaming as if the
White Eagle had escaped his prison, and the rain pelting the world.
All summer they had been out, rain or shine, like water-ouzels, but now
they were glad to sit about the fire with the shutters all closed, and
the smoke now and then driven down into the room by the storm. Before
evening the little ones were begging for stories.
"I wish I could remember a saga I heard last Yule," Nikolina said at
last. "It was about a voyage the Vikings made to a country where the
people had never seen cattle. When they heard the cattle bellowing they
all ran away and left the furs they had come to sell."
"Tell all you remember and make up the rest," suggested Karen, but
Nikolina shook her head.
"One should never do that with a saga."
"I know that tale," spoke up Thorolf suddenly, although he had never in
his life repeated a saga. "Grandmother used to tell it. In the beginning
Bjarni Heriulfson the sea-rover, after many years came home to Iceland
to drink wassail in his father's house.
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