"Why don't you speak to the pastor, and have him arrested?" said Arnfinn, impatient of Hans's long-winded recital.
"No, no, say nothing to father," demanded Augusta, eagerly. "Why should you arrest a poor man as long as he does nothing worse than sleep in the barns in the out-fields?""As you say, miss," retorted Hans, and departed.
The moon came up pale and mist-like over the eastern mountain ridges, struggled for a few brief moments feebly with the sunlight, and then vanished.
"It is strange," said Arnfinn, "how everything reminds me of Strand to- night.What gloriously absurd apostrophes to the moon he could make! I have not told you, cousin, of a very singular gift which he possesses. He can attract all kinds of birds and wild animals to himself; he can imitate their voices, and they flock around him, as if he were one of them, without fear of harm.""How delightful," cried Augusta, with sudden animation. "What a glorious man your friend must be!""Because the snipes and the wild ducks like him? You seem to have greater confidence in their judgment than in mine.""Of course I have--at least as long as you persist in joking.But,jesting aside, what a wondrously beautiful life he must lead whom Nature takes thus into her confidence; who has, as it were, an inner and subtler sense, corresponding to each grosser and external one; who is keen- sighted enough to read the character of every individual beast, and has ears sensitive to the full pathos of joy or sorrow in the song of the birds that inhabit our woodlands.""Whether he has any such second set of senses as you speak of, I don't know; but there can be no doubt that his familiarity, not to say intimacy, with birds and beasts gives him a great advantage as a naturalist. I suppose you know that his little book has been translated into French, and rewarded with the gold medal of the Academy.""Hush!What is that?" Augusta sprang up, and held her hand to herear.
"Some love-lorn mountain-cock playing yonder in the pine copse,"suggested Arnfinn, amused at his cousin's eagerness.
"You silly boy! Don't you know the mountain- cock never plays except at sunrise?""He would have a sorry time of it now, then, when there IS no sunrise.""And so he has; he does not play except in early spring."The noise, at first faint, now grew louder. It began with a series of mellow, plaintive clucks that followed thickly one upon another, like smooth pearls of sound that rolled through the throat in a continuous current; then came a few sharp notes as of a large bird that snaps his bill; then a long, half-melodious rumbling, intermingled with cacklings and snaps, and at last, a sort of diminuendo movement of the same round, pearly clucks. There was a whizzing of wing-beats in the air; two large birds swept over their heads and struck down into the copse whence the sound had issued.
"This is indeed a most singular thing," said Augusta, under her breath, and with wide-eyed wonder. "Let us go nearer, and see what it can be.""I am sure I can go if you can," responded Arnfinn, not any too eagerly. "Give me your hand, and we can climb the better."As they approached the pine copse, which
projected like a promontory from the line of the denser forest, the noise ceased, and only the plaintive whistling of a mountain-hen, calling her scattered young together, and now and then the shrill response of a snipe to the cry of its lonely mate, fell upon the summer night, not as an interruption, but as an outgrowth of the very silence. Augusta stole with soundless tread through the transparent gloom which lingered under those huge black crowns, and Arnfinn followed impatiently after. Suddenly she motioned to him to stand still, and herself bent forward in an attitude of surprise and eager observation. On the ground, some fifty steps from where she was stationed, she saw a man stretched out full length, with a knapsack under his head, and surrounded by a flock of downy, half-grown birds, which responded with a low, anxious piping to his alluring cluck, then scattered with sudden alarm, only to return again in the same curious, cautious fashion as before. Now and then there was a great flapping of wings in the trees overhead, and a heavy brown and black speckled mountain-hen alighted close to the man's head, stretched out her neck toward him, cocked her head, called her scattered brood together, and departed with slow and deliberate wing-beats.
