Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/308

the eyes that go blind first, and another in another land that a man is never a prophet in his own country. So the most open book is that least read, and the moral that is more plain than any, discovered last of all.

And now for Johanna.

The Johanna whom Hjorth had left was not the Johanna of three weeks later. She had been only an imaginative child while the deacon was at Helga, a child whom nature was expanding from a lover of fairy stories and the wonderful supernatural, to a worshipper of the human living hero. When the object of her delightful day-dreams, of her very active and ever-present admiration was withdrawn, she comprehended reality. Reality became to her an unpleasant fact. She understood the meaning of life, and life was sad to the girl.

It was sad to her so far as she could recognise a reason, because she could look no further forward than the dull, uninteresting present. Existence is very monotonous in farm life. Every day brought her the same duties to perform; the care of her small cousins and of the poultry yard, the laying of the table and the clearing up and washing of the things, needlework, more care of the children and of the poultry yard, more needlework, and then bed. To a nature in which environment was scarcely less actual than the spirit of past ages, this was weariness. Johanna came of a stock of adventurers. The blood of the Vikings coursed in her veins, and, strangely enough, though she was a gentle maiden, most delicately and tenderly formed, and though for generations past her forebears had been drifting slowly and very securely intothe