“Ah, here comes the schoolmaster’s Gertrude!” she remarked to herself as she saw a pretty young girl coming down the road.  “Her eyes sparkle like sunbeams on the snow.  She feels happy now because she expects to be married in the fall to young Ingmar Ingmarsson.  I see she has a bundle of thread tucked under her arm.  She is going to weave table covers and bed hangings for her new home.  But before that weaving is done, destruction will be upon us.”

The old woman cast dark glances about her.  She could see that the village had grown and developed into an astonishing thing of beauty, but she thought that all these pretty white-and-yellow houses, with their fancy gables and their big bowed windows, would collapse the same as her humble gray cabin, where moss grew in the cracks between the logs, and the windows were only holes in the wall.  When she reached the heart of the town, she stopped short and struck her cane hard against the pavement.  A sudden feeling of indignation had seized her.  “Woe, woe!” she cried, in so loud a voice that people in the street paused and looked round.  “Yea, in all these houses live such as have rejected the Gospel of Christ and cling to the enemy’s teaching.  Why didn’t they listen to the call and turn away from their sins?  On their account we must all perish.  God’s hand strikes heavily.  It strikes both the just and the unjust.”

When she had crossed the river she was overtaken by some of the other Hellgumists.  They were Corporal Felt and Bullet Gunner and his wife, Brita.  Shortly afterward, they were joined by Hoek Matts Ericsson, his son Gabriel, and Gunhild, the daughter of Councilman Clementsson.

All these people in their gayly coloured national costumes made a pretty picture walking along the snow-covered road.  But to the mind of Eva Gunnersdotter, they were only doomed prisoners being led to the place of execution, like cattle driven to slaughter.

The Hellgumists looked quite dejected.  They walked along, their eyes on the ground, as if weighed down by a terrible load of discouragement.  They had all expected that the Celestial Kingdom would suddenly spread over the whole earth, and that they would live to see the day when the New Jerusalem should come down from the clouds of heaven.  But now that they had become so few in number, and could not help seeing that theirs was a forlorn hope, it was as if something within them had snapped.  They moved slowly and with dragging steps.  Now and then a sigh would escape them, but they seemed to have nothing to say to each other.  For this had been a matter of supreme earnest with them.  They had staked their all upon it, and had lost.

“Why do they look so down-in-the-mouth?” wondered the old woman.  “They don’t seem to believe the worst, and don’t want to understand what Hellgum writes.  I’ve tried to explain his words to them, but they won’t even listen to me.  Alas! those who live on the lowlands, under an open sky, can never understand what it is to be afraid.  They don’t think the same thoughts as do those of us who live in the solitude of the dark forest.”