CHILDREN OF THE MOOR
[Illustration: THE CHILDREN FROM BARREN MOOR]
CHILDREN
OF THE MOOR
BY
LAURA FITINGHOFF
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY
SIRI ANDREWS
_With Illustrations by_
GUSTAF TENGGREN
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1927
COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY SIRI ANDREWS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY CLARA WHITEHILL HUNT ix
I. SEVEN FRIENDLESS CHILDREN 3
II. WOLVES’ TRACKS 17
III. THE SPECTACLE MAN 26
IV. A BLEAK MORNING BOTH INSIDE AND OUT 39
V. ALL HANDS ON DECK 45
VI. THE SPECTACLE MAN ALONE AGAIN 52
VII. SEPARATED 55
VIII. WHERE IS MARTHA-GRETA? 63
IX. ‘HENNENLY TANA’ 67
X. A DAINTY LITTLE MAID 75
XI. TWO LITTLE MAIDS 78
XII. EARNINGS AND THE MONEY QUESTION 81
XIII. IN THE PLACE OF THE DEAD 89
XIV. PER-ERIK AND ANNA-LISA 100
XV. GHOSTS ON THE ICE 104
XVI. IN A DEN OF THIEVES 111
XVII. THE ‘WEDDING-FARM’ 121
XVIII. FLIGHT 127
XIX. FIRE 134
XX. IN THEIR OWN GREEN COTTAGE 146
XXI. MASTER AND MISTRESS 158
XXII. DRIVEN AWAY 174
XXIII. AN UNEXPECTED MEETING 183
XXIV. THE LAPLANDER’S HUT 187
XXV. AGAIN DEPENDENT ON THEMSELVES 193
XXVI. THE BRIDE 198
XXVII. A PROBLEM, A CHOICE, AND SORROW 210
XXVIII. MAGNUS AND GOLDEN HORN 216
XXIX. WHEN MAGNUS WAS LEFT ALONE 221
XXX. IN THE BERRY WOODS 226
XXXI. A STRUGGLE WITH OLD BRUIN 229
XXXII. UP AT A DAIRY FARM 237
XXXIII. QUARRELS AND RECONCILIATION 244
XXXIV. AGAIN IN THE PULPIT 254
XXXV. SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT 258
XXXVI. AGAIN A MESSAGE FROM MOTHER 262
XXXVII. MAGLENA 266
XXXVIII. ALL THE SEVEN FROM THE LITTLE GRAY COTTAGE 271
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE CHILDREN FROM BARREN MOOR _Colored frontispiece_
HE WAS TOO STIFF AND FROZEN TO BE ABLE TO PUT WOOD IN
THE GRATE AND LIGHT A FIRE. ANDY DID IT FOR HIM 118
HERE UNDER THE TREE, WITH THE THICK BRANCHES RESTING
ON THE GROUND, THEY COULD BE SAFE 140
‘OLD BRUIN, OLD WOOLLY COAT, BIG FATHER,’ SHOOK HIMSELF 234
INTRODUCTION
When one has been watching for many years the apparent efforts of
story-book-makers and others to standardize the minds of our children,
to come upon ‘Children of the Moor’ is like finding a spring of water
in a thirsty land. It is surprising that a book which has run through
nine large editions in Sweden, and has been published in Germany,
Denmark, Norway, Holland, and England waited all these years for a
children’s librarian to go to Stockholm to discover it for American
children.
The author, Laura (Runsten) Fitinghoff, grew up in a large and wealthy
parsonage in Ångermanland, Sweden. She was one of five children in a
home ‘where music and spiritual nourishment were given the children
just as naturally as milk and bread were given other children,’ writes
her daughter. In the parsonage were entertained such distinguished
people as Jenny Lind, King Charles XV, and King Oscar II, but the poor
of the great parish, too, were welcome guests. During famine years,
when groups of starving people wandered over Sweden, none were turned
away empty-handed from Pastor Runsten’s door; and the scenes of one
particularly sad famine year so impressed a gifted daughter of the
house that the beautiful and moving story of ‘Children of the Moor’ was
written.
We are so accustomed to prosperity in America, and so tenderly careful
to protect our children from hardship, that there is danger of our
leaving out of their training the lessons which can be learned only
from suffering. How can a child be stirred to pity and sympathy and
unselfish giving who is not allowed even to hear that there are sad and
hungry people in the world? Child readers of ‘Children of the Moor’
will be deeply interested in the strange and eventful wanderings of
the brave children of this story; they will rejoice in the happiness
that finally comes to the brothers and sisters, and their mental
outlook will be wider, and their sympathies deeper for traveling, in
imagination, with these story-book companions.
We owe Miss Andrews a debt of gratitude for bringing the book to
America and for her beautiful translation of it.
CLARA WHITEHILL HUNT
BROOKLYN, 1927
CHILDREN OF THE MOOR
CHILDREN OF THE MOOR
∵
CHAPTER I
SEVEN FRIENDLESS CHILDREN
It is a year of famine up in Norrland.[1] ‘A year of famine’ means that
one is almost without food in those places where the flock of children
is large and the bit of ground small, from which one has to live.
[1] Norrland means the provinces farthest north in Sweden.
In good years there are gladness and laughter and noise wherever one
turns. One has sweet white turnips to eat, and peas in full pods grow
in the fields. Enough of bread, butter, cheese, and of other nice good
things is found even in tiny cottages and poor men’s homes.
But in _years of famine_ one sees little happiness. The snow lies on
the ground until toward midsummer. The turnips, which are planted as
seed in the ground, have hardly time to become as big as small potatoes
before the frost comes and makes the ground around them so hard and
crowded that they cannot grow any more. The pea-pods hang withered
like little blackened rags out in the pea-field--not a single pea in
them. The same with the ears of barley which used to hold themselves
so proudly on their high waving stalks; they hang on the short green
blades as if broken.
So you can understand that in a year of famine no grain and no peas
come to the mill to be ground, and if, on some farm higher up, the
frost has come more sparingly, the grain is still so weak and queer
that the flour becomes gray-black, and the pancakes one bakes of it are
like a thin mud puddle. One mixes the bark of trees in the flour to
make bread.
There is not much nourishment in such food. The children soon become
thin. Their rosy cheeks take on a grayish color and their eyes no
longer shine.
When the children in groups follow their parents down to the frost-free
districts to beg for food, they look like little old men and women. It
cuts one to the heart to see them.
* * * * *
During the awful year of famine late in the 1860’s, just such a group
came wandering down from Barren Moor away up in Norrland, a group of
seven children who wandered alone through lonely, impoverished winter
settlements. No father or mother accompanied them: seven emaciated
little ones, and the one who led them was only twelve years old. His
name was Andy, or really Anders.
The children were from Barren Moor, where the frost had been hardest.
Their father, weakened by bark bread and starvation food, had fallen
under a giant pine which he had been helping to fell in the woods, and
had been killed.
His wife, worn out by trouble and sorrow and hunger, died soon after.
Her greatest anxiety had been the children for whom she had worked and
suffered. She feared that they would have to go to the poor-house, or,
still worse, ‘be put up at auction’ for those who would take them for
the little sum of money the community would pay, in such a year when
all must earn in order to live.
But Andy promised: ‘We’ll go away from here, mother. We’ll put the
little girls on the sled and go from farm to farm like other grown-up,
wandering people. The school-teacher’s Carl says that his father says
that people in the settlements have both grain and potatoes. You’ll
see, mother, that there is enough for us too.’ And she was comforted.
Mother was hardly in the grave before the men of the parish came
together to put the children in the poor-house or auction them out.
But the day they came to the tumble-down cottage where they expected to
find the children, it was empty.
The shelter of boards near by, where the goat used to be, was also
empty. In the cottage, everything was scrubbed and tidy, as if orderly
grown folk had intended to leave it to others.
The children they came to seek had apparently set out the day before.
But the men agreed that they would not have to wait long before they
had them back again. Telephone and telegraph were not to be found up
there in the wilderness, and nothing could be done about finding them.
All the horses which belonged in the village were in the lumber camps.
And if they had been at home, who would have had time to go out on a
hunt for mere youngsters?
So the children wandered away undisturbed. But during the day the two
littlest girls, Brita-Carrie and Martha-Greta, began to whimper and
whine.
They did not cry because they were so cold that nose and hands were as
blue as cornflowers and toes so frozen that they could not stand on
their feet. No, they wailed and wept from hunger. They would have eaten
the hardest crust of bread or the tiniest potato with gusto. But the
road through the Great Woods was twelve miles long, and they had not
been within the door of a cottage all day long. They stayed away from
houses first for fear they would be held and sent to the poor-house,
and later of necessity, because there was not even the poorest kind of
hut in all the woods.
‘Come, Golden Horn,’ coaxed Andy at last, ‘I can’t stand hearing the
children cry like that. You’ll have to pull at her again, Anna-Lisa.’
‘Yes, but it is a sin the way we have torn at her for milk to-day,’
objected Anna-Lisa, who was ten.
‘But be quiet then, children. You’ll get another drop of milk. Golden
Horn, nice good little girl, come now so I can milk you. The children
are starving to death.’
Golden Horn, the thin yet splendid goat, emerged from the low firs
beside the road where she had made a good meal. She stood quietly
beside Anna-Lisa, who squatted down and drew a few streams of milk into
a small wooden bowl she held in her left hand.
‘Give me too! Give me too!’ whimpered Per-Erik and Magnus.
‘You should be ashamed! Big men like you. You, Per-Erik, are five years
old, and you, Magnus, six.’
‘No, sir, I’m five! Mother said so, and she gave me milk sometimes too.’
‘But you’ll be six at Candlemas, and it is only a week until then. We
men-folk mustn’t give up like that. Run ahead and hold on to Golden
Horn’s fur and then your hands won’t be cold.’
It was Andy who talked and commanded, and the little boys knew no other
way than to obey, and especially since Golden Horn, ‘who had human
sense,’ as they firmly believed, came close to them with her warm
woolly coat.
‘Bring Golden Horn here, so we can get warm too,’ cried the little
maids on the sled.
‘But you must be good. Think if mother heard her little girls whine
like that. You’ve just had milk that was both sweet and warm.’
‘But that was like nothing,’ wailed Brita-Carrie. ‘Like nonnin,’
repeated Martha-Greta, with tears in her great sorrowful eyes.
‘It was two spoonfuls each. And now soon we’ll come to some big farm
where you’ll get food. Sit down on the sled--you too, Maglena, then you
can warm each other. So there now, good little girls who don’t cry any
more. Mother would be so happy if she saw you.’
Andy stroked the blue-cold cheeks of his little sisters, tucked their
stiff cold hands in the ragged shawls they had tied crosswise about
their waists, and bundled the worn old sheepskin robe tightly around
their feet.
‘Now you push, Anna-Lisa, so we’ll get out of the woods. The
school-teacher’s Carl said that as soon as we saw what was left of
the hut where the Lapp Israel died, we shouldn’t be far from the
settlement.’
‘Yes, but he told me that wolves wandered around in the mountains. He
said I was crazy to go off with you.’
Anna-Lisa walked stooped forward and pushed the sled. Her tears fell on
the little sisters’ bundled-up heads. She sobbed so that it sounded as
though she hiccoughed.
‘I won’t bother to answer when you talk so foolishly,’ shrieked Andy in
a loud voice in order to make himself heard. He walked far ahead and
pulled with the rope over his shoulder. ‘Perhaps you think that Carl
would have taken care of you, given you food and clothes. Maybe they
don’t have the house full of children themselves.’
‘But then I wouldn’t have to starve, and freeze to death!’
‘Just as if they had wanted to have you there! You would have been in
the poor-house this day with leprous Barbara and crazy Lars.’
‘They don’t starve, and they don’t freeze to death either.’
‘Ugh, what a girl! This morning you ate all the water gruel you wanted,
and you had as much as we did of the goat’s-milk cheese and bread that
Sven Paul gave us. But because you can’t eat the whole day long you
whine and want to turn back, and to the poor-house besides.’
‘Well, where do you think we’ll come to now, then? I suppose you think
of taking us to the king. Boo-hoo-hoo,’ sobbed Anna-Lisa.
‘As far as that goes, I could do that too--and ask him to take you. You
could at least watch his goats for him. That would be something big,
that would, instead of sitting and staring in front of the poor-house
fire.’
‘How many goats do you suppose he has, the king?’ piped Maglena out of
the shawl opening.
She thought that at this talk about the king, life began to brighten a
bit. To tell the truth, she had agreed with Anna-Lisa the whole time,
though she thought it unfair that both of them should attack Andy, who,
she knew, had not tasted a bite before they left in the morning until
all the rest had had enough.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Andy, ‘how many goats the king has. Little-hut
people like us can have one, a cottager five or six, a big farmer
twenty or more.’
‘Goodness, then the king must have a hundred. I certainly can’t take
care of so many.’
Anna-Lisa let go of the sled, and wiped the tears out of her eyes.
Even Andy stopped, so the rope hung slack. He took off the moth-eaten
fur cap which had been father’s and wiped the sweat from his beautiful
forehead. His blue eyes shone indignantly as he looked back at his
sister.
‘Maybe the king has one hundred goats, maybe he has a thousand--yes,
just as many as a Laplander has reindeer. But do you think the king
hasn’t sense enough to figure out how many goats a little one like you
can watch? If he thinks you can take care of a hundred, then you can,
for then he has a special kind of easily watched goats, maybe from
Jerusalem, or maybe he has some wonderful goat watchdogs that can call
them together.’
‘Just think how fine you’ll be, Anna-Lisa. Maybe you’ll have shoes with
elastic sides and a silk shawl on your head and a skirt with little
roses on it so you will look like the briar-rose hill in the summer. To
think that you’ll be so fine!’
Maglena drew the shawl from her nose and tried to turn so she could
gaze at Anna-Lisa. A sweet little lass was Maglena, with golden brown
hair, bright and curly, and big deep blue eyes glowing with kindness.
It was as if she believed that Anna-Lisa, who walked behind and pushed
the sled, was already dressed in elastic shoes and a briar-rose dress
and silk headcloth, just because she imagined her so.
Anna-Lisa did not look especially attractive at this moment, with a
gray-black woolen scarf wound about her head and tied in a knot at the
back of her neck, with mother’s old striped jacket, the waist of which
reached her knees, and mother’s ragged run-down shoes. The hay which
they had stuffed in for warmth and filling stuck out through the holes.
It certainly was not easy to walk through the woods for many, many
miles in such an outfit, and it was perhaps not to be wondered at that
Anna-Lisa’s otherwise not unpleasant face with the blue eyes and light
hair now had a dark and bitter look.
She and her brother struggled on again with the sled. Anna-Lisa
muttered and mumbled to herself, but Maglena was in high spirits--in
her mind’s eye she saw the glorious existence of the king’s goatherd.
‘Per-Erik, Magnus, wait,’ she called to the two brothers. In ragged
Lapp shoes and father’s clothes, so hopelessly ill-fitting, they
pattered away, one on either side of the goat, their hands in her
coarse hair.
The boys stopped and waited. They were thoroughly disgusted, and tired
of the endless journey. ‘Men-folk,’ if you like, and five and six years
old as much as you please, hunger gnawed in small stomachs just the
same, the cold bit into fingers and toes, and the clothing had more
weight than warmth. But enough that they were sufficiently manly to
keep their whining and complaints to themselves, though tears ran down
the blue cheeks and small shoulders sometimes shook with suppressed
sobs.
‘What is it now?’ they said with manly superiority, when they were
beside the sled. ‘Shall we help you pull? You must be getting tired,
Andy.’
Magnus pushed up over his forehead the cap, which had been
grandfather’s at Sven Paul’s and which reached down over his ears, and
stealthily rubbed away any possible traces of altogether too unmanly
tears.
Andy spat in his hands, took hold of the rope so that it cut a deep
groove in the homespun jacket just on the shoulder, where, old and worn
as it was, it could not stand much more wear.
He strained and pulled as if the uphill they had just reached were a
slanting downhill stretch, and paid no attention to Magnus’s pitiable
suggestion. Even the rounded back seemed to show how miserable he
thought it was.
‘You can’t pull us all; any one knows that such talk is only boasting,’
said Maglena, who felt talkative and wasn’t so cold now that the little
sisters were squeezed close against her and were still, for they
had fallen asleep. ‘But now you’ll hear something nice. Do you know,
Anna-Lisa is going to be goatherd for the king! He has many hundred
goats, bigger than our Golden Horn.’
‘No goat is like Golden Horn, if you please,’ said Magnus, and looked
threateningly at Maglena.
‘Is that so? Have you seen goats from Jerusalem, maybe? They have horns
that look exactly like the moon when it is new and shiny, just like
that they shine. And they come in hundred thousands, and you can see
them running over the marshes and eating berries.’
‘If we only had some here! I could eat a thousand quarts,’ sighed
Per-Erik.
‘Yes, they eat berries.’ Maglena’s voice had a longing, dreamy sound.
‘They eat berries, for the whole marsh is full of them--and cream out
of big troughs; the king never thinks twice about it.’
‘And as much clap-bread[2] as we could carry on the sled,’ added
Per-Erik with a disapproving glance at the useless burden it then
carried.
[2] Clap-bread is a dark bread, large and round, almost as thin as
paper, folded twice to make four layers, dry, and almost
tasteless.
‘Of course the king’s goats eat clap-bread.’ Maglena continued her
description without in the least minding her brothers’ lack of interest
in the subject and their perpetual return to the question of food.
‘Yes, they eat clap-bread out of the little mangers.’
‘I thought they were out in the marshes just now. Goats certainly
aren’t indoors that time of the summer,’ remarked Andy, who, in order
to hear what Maglena said, even if it was silly, had pushed his cap up
sideways away from his ears so that it was on the point of falling off
his head altogether.
‘I suppose they must come in in the evening because of the mosquitoes
and insects and because of old Bruin. They can’t be free of old Bruin
even at the king’s, can they?’
‘Who’d want to be out and watch goats all night anyway, for that
matter?’ Anna-Lisa graciously entered into the conversation. ‘Be out
and watch goats when you should be in eating the pork that they fry at
the king’s so the grease runs and it smells so--yes, so that----’
Anna-Lisa could not find words to express how wonderful the smell of
fried pork was at the king’s.
‘And whole kettles full of potatoes,’ added Magnus eagerly.
‘That have cracked in their jackets, and that you can eat by the peck,’
said Per-Erik.
‘Yes, after the goats have had theirs. Listen. They come over the marsh
and they have eaten so much that they are just as round as the sow they
killed at Sven Paul’s this fall.’
‘Then they can’t jump so much either, and it will be easier to look
after them,’ said Anna-Lisa approvingly.
‘No, they walk just like the sow walked, waddling like that. And then
they climb up on the mountain. It is as bright as the rooster on the
church at the king’s dairy farm. And then the goats come there, you
see, and it is perfectly light from all those hundred thousand horns
that are like the moon when it is new.’
‘And how they’d milk, such goats!’ said Magnus with yearning in his
voice. ‘You could have some then.’
‘And make cheeses so that you’d burst, you could eat so much,’ from
Per-Erik.
‘Yes, but you see the king must have as much as he can eat first, and
all his men-servants and maids,’ said Maglena, all eagerness.
‘Besides, you know, children, the king can have much finer things even
than pork and potatoes and goat’s-milk cheese. He can have fresh salmon
if he wants it,’ said Andy loftily.
‘Not in the winter, though. When the salmon creeps along the bottom
of the river to the big water, then it isn’t good to take,’ remarked
Anna-Lisa.
‘In the winter he eats fine things, anyway.’ Andy settled the question
without allowing himself to be put out of countenance. ‘Then he eats
the finest food, and it is like a catechism party[3] every single day.’
[3] Catechism party. At certain times each year the people of the
parish gathered together to be examined by the parish minister in
the catechism as a test of their ability to read, and a feast
always followed.
‘Then does he have meat-balls and Christmas fish[4] and prune soup?’
questioned Maglena. Her eyes sparkled at the thought of such an
existence.
[4] Christmas fish. Codfish or ling steeped in lye and eaten at
Christmas time; it becomes very white and fluffy and is considered
a special delicacy.
‘Yes, and rice gruel as much as he is able to eat.’
‘And coffee, of course,’ put in Anna-Lisa. ‘And he never drinks a drop
without having bread to sop in it as much as he wants. Oh, but that
coffee would be strong and salty!’[5]
[5] In northern Norrland it is customary to salt coffee.
‘Oh, if we only were the king so we could have all that!’ cried Magnus
from the depths of his heart.
‘And then he has a big, big house, where it is nicer than the
parsonage, truly like a golden house; and then he knows where he
is going to sleep, not in such an old shack as ours was,’ muttered
Anna-Lisa.
‘As ours was! Isn’t that good enough? If we were lucky enough to own
that! With a little vegetable garden and the big fine bird-cherry tree.
If it were so that we could be there again, Golden Horn and all of us,
then I think that we should be just as well off as the king.’ Andy,
who spoke, looked earnestly at his brothers and sisters. ‘You see, it
is something that mother was there--and died there, and never shall we
find such a hut again.’