A little while after I had come running to father, who stood in his
shirt-sleeves over in the meadow, mowing with the others, and had said,
sobbing, that mother was dead.

From that hour my mother was out of her mind. For many years she had to
be constantly watched in her own room, and my father must have had many
a sad hour. Afterwards she was taken to a lunatic asylum in Trondhjem,
where two years later she died, without having come to her right mind
for one moment.

The person who had the charge of me during this time was old Anne Kvæn,
a pock-marked, masculine-looking woman, with little brown eyes, rough,
iron-grey hair, strongly marked, almost witch-like features, and as a
rule a short, black clay pipe in her mouth. She had been my mother's
nurse, and was attached to her with her whole soul. When my mother went
out of her mind, she begged earnestly to become her guardian in the blue
room; but this had to be given up, as it was evident that it was just
her presence that most excited the patient's mind. My mother could not
bear to see father either, and me they never dared show her at all.

Old Anne Kvæn had been my mother's only confidante. She was extremely
superstitious and strange. In her imagination, hobgoblins and gnomes
occupied the store-house and boat-house, as surely as my father resided
in the main building; and under the mountain to the east of the harbour,
the underground people carried on, invisibly, their fishing and trading
with Bergen, just as my father did his, visibly, in the world. Old Anne
had certainly filled my poor mother's head with her mystic
superstition, to no less an extent than she did mine. There were all
kinds of marks and signs to be made from morning till night, and she