FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD


WHEN Urda Bjarnason tells a tale all
the men stop their talking to lis-
ten, for they know her to be wise
with the wisdom of the old people,
and that she has more learning than can be
got even from the great schools at Reykjavik.
She is especially prized by them here in this
new country where the Icelandmen are settled
-- this America, so new in letters, where the
people speak foolishly and write unthinking
books. So the men who know that it is given
to the mothers of earth to be very wise, stop
their six part singing, or their jangles about
the free-thinkers, and give attentive ear when
Urda Bjarnason lights her pipe and begins her
tale.

She is very old. Her daughters and sons
are all dead, but her granddaughter, who is
most respectable, and the cousin of a phy-
sician, says that Urda is twenty-four and a
hundred, and there are others who say that
she is older still. She watches all that the
Iceland people do in the new land; she knows
about the building of the five villages on the
North Dakota plain, and of the founding of