Outside the fence lay a half-bare rocky hill, behind which my mother had a bench.

Above this on a stony heap grew raspberry-bushes, and beside them stood a few small birch-trees.
While I was scrambling about among the stones, picking raspberries, father called my mother.
When she had gone away, there came over to me from the other side of the hill a tall, pale lady, who seemed older than mother, dressed in black, with a stand-up, white, frilled collar; she looked at me very kindly, and stretched out to me a wild rose spray she had in her hand.
I did not feel at all afraid, and it did not seem as if she were a stranger.

Then she nodded sadly to me in farewell, and went back the same way she had come.
When mother returned I told her that such a kind, strange lady had been there, but she must have been in great sorrow, and now she was gone.
My mother--I remember it, as if it were yesterday--stood still for a minute, as white as a sheet, looking at me with anguish in her eyes, as if we were both going to die, then she threw her arms above her head, and fell fainting to the ground.
I was too frightened to cry, but I remember that, while she lay stretched insensible on the grass by the bench, I threw myself upon her, crying, "Mother! mother!" 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 Kvaen, 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.