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THE AMERICAN-SCANDINA VI AN REVIEW 
The stars stretch forth their silver hands 
And beckon the kings of the eastern lands; 
The rags come singing with holy sound 
And humbly sink to the living ground, 
Praising the Lord made manifest. 
Who smiles from the Mother s lovely breast. 
They rise again from the darkened mould 
In petals 0 f purple, crimson, and gold. 
Innocent children, devout and fair. 
Half-lifted, half-bent to the earth in prayer. 
Holding their yellow urns astir 
With the sweetness of f rankincense and myrrh. 
The Eclipse 
By Selma Lagerloe 
Translated by Velma Swanston Howard 
There were Stina of Bidgecote and Lina of Birdsong and Kajsa 
of Littlemai sh and JMaja of Sky peak and Beda of Finn-darkness and 
Elin, the new wife on the old soldier s place, and two or three other 
peasant women besides—all of them lived at the far end of the parish, 
below Stoihoj den, in a region so wild and rocky none of the big farm 
owners had bothered to lay hands on it. 
One had her cabin set up on a shelf of rock, another had hers put 
up at the edge of a bog, while a third had one that stood at the crest 
of a lull so steep it was a toilsome climb getting to it. If bv chance 
any of the others had a cottage built on more favorable ground, you 
may be sure it lay so close to the mountain as to shut out the sun from 
autumn fair time clear up to Annunciation Day. 
1 he^ each cultivated a little potato patch close by the cabin, 
though under serious difficulties. To be sure, there were many kinds 
of soil there at the foot of the mountain, but it ^vas hard work to make 
the jiatches of land yield anything. In some places they had to clear 
J ch stone from their fields, it would have built a cow-house 
on a manorial estate; in some they had dug ditches as deep as graves, 
and in others they had brought their earth in sacks and spread it on 
the bare rocks. Where the soil was not so poor, they were forever 
fighting the tough thistle and pigweed which sprang up in such pro¬ 
fusion you would have thought the whole potato land had been pre¬ 
pared for their benefit. 
