Excerpt from Gunnar: A Tale of Norse Life At the northern end of the lake, the Yokul, the son of winter, lifts his mighty head above the clouds, and looks in cold contempt down upon the world below; with his arms, the long, freezing glaciers, he embraces the landscape around him, hugging it tightly to his frosty bosom. On the eastern Side the rocks open wide enough for a little brook to escape from the mountains into the valley and as it runs chattering between the ferns and under the tree-roots, it tells them from year to year an endless tale of the longings of the lake and of the despotic sway of the stern old Yokul. But once every year, when spring comes with merry birds and sunshine, the little brook feels itself larger and stronger, and it swells with joy, and bounds laughing over the crooked tree-roots, and throws in its wantonness a kiss of good-by to its old friends, the ferns. Every Spring the brook is glad; for it knows it will join the river, it knows it will reach the ocean. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.