With Ole Haugen legend ends, and now history begins.  Ole’s bridal march kept its place in the house of Tingvold.  It was sung, and hummed, and whistled, and fiddled, in the house and in the stable, in the field and on the mountain-side.  The only child born of the marriage, little Astrid, was rocked and sung to sleep with it by mother, by father, and by servants, and it was one of the first things she herself learned.  There was music in the race, and this bright little one had her full share of it, and soon could hum her parent’s triumphal march, the talisman of her family, in quite a masterly way.

It was hardly to be wondered at that when she grew up, she too wished to choose her lover.  Many came to woo, but at the age of twenty-three the rich and gifted girl was still single.  The reason came out at last.  In the house lived a quick-witted youth, whom Aslaug had taken in out of pity.  He went by the name of the tramp or gipsy, though he was neither.  But Aslaug was ready enough to call him so when she heard that Astrid and he were betrothed.  They had pledged faith to each other in all secrecy out on the hill pastures, and had sung the bridal march together, she on the height, he answering from below.

The lad was sent away at once.  No one could now show more pride of race than Aslaug, the poor cottar’s daughter.  Astrid’s father called to mind what was prophesied when he broke the tradition of his family.  Had it now come to a husband being taken in from the wayside?  Where would it end?  And the neighbours said much the same.

“The tramp,” Knut by name, soon became well known to every one, as he took to dealing in cattle on his own account.  He was the first in that part of the country to do it to any extent, and his enterprise had begun to benefit the whole district, raising prices, and bringing in capital.  But he was apt to bring drinking bouts, and often fighting, in his train; and this was all that people talked of as yet; they had not begun to understand his capabilities as a business man.

Astrid was determined, and she was twenty-three, and her parents came to see that either the farm must go out of the family or Knut must come into it; through their own marriage they had lost the moral authority that might have stood them in good stead now.  So Astrid had her way.  One fine day the handsome, merry Knut drove with her to church.  The strains of the family bridal march, her grandfather’s masterpiece, were wafted back over the great procession, and the two seemed to be sitting humming it quietly, and very happy they looked.  And every one wondered how the parents looked so happy too, for they had opposed the marriage long and obstinately.