ch in honor of the day. I can still see his thin
white fingers round the broken glass while he spouted and speechified
about "our young freedom crowns this day of liberty with flowers." I had
lately read the whole speech in an old children's paper, and of course
had to confide this fact to Mina; the others wanted to know what we were
laughing about, and at last all the listeners were laughing and
whispering to each other; but Ezekiel stuck to it. After the speech four
stones were thrown down. Karsten was beaming. "Oh, oh, what a crash!" he
kept saying.

After that Ezekiel made a speech in honor of Sweden; at the end of the
speech he suggested that we should sing:

"See yonder by the Baltic's salt waves,"

but as none of us knew the tune, and Ezekiel himself hadn't a speck of
music in him, the song wouldn't go. For it didn't help us at all for him
to insist that he heard the tune plainly in his head. Then Nils Trap
made a speech in honor of the ladies; I remember how I admired the few
telling words: "A cheer and four shots for the ladies!" Not a bit more!
I thought that sounded so awfully manlike.

Peter rushed off to the top of the fort to fire off the shots, Karsten
after him, his hair standing on end. The stones went crashing over--the
next moment we heard a doleful shriek from below. Peter came rushing
down to the dungeon, ashy-gray under his freckles, crying:

"Oh, Mother--Mother----"

We all dashed up instantly. Down below the fort, just at the foot of the
precipice, stood the dean's little crooked wife, with a purple kerchief
over her head and one slender hand held up in the air. The stone, which
had been fired off in honor of the ladies, lay less than two feet from
her!

Even to this day I am sorry that I didn't run to her at once and go back
with her down the hill. That didn't occur to any of us, I think. When we
found that she hadn't been hit, but was only terribly frightened at
seeing the great stone in the air right over her, we almost thought, up
there in the fort, that it was rather unseemly of the dean's wife to
scream out so.

She crept down the hill alone; she had just gone up to see to a white
bed-spread that was hanging on a bush to dry.

Our festive mood was gone, however,--shocked out of us, as it were.

Karsten struck into the air with clenched fists, as he always does when
he is excited. It wasn't so very dangerous, he protested; for if _he_
had been the dean's wife, of course he wo