hem. But Prince was a knowing little
beast, and she grew fond of him. After breakfast I made him do his
lessons; play dead dog, shake hands, stand up like a soldier. We used
to put my cadet cap on his head--I had to take military drill at the
university--and give him a yard-measure to hold with his front leg. His
gravity made us laugh immoderately.

Lena's talk always amused me. Antonia had never talked like the people
about her. Even after she learned to speak English readily, there was
always something impulsive and foreign in her speech. But Lena had
picked up all the conventional expressions she heard at Mrs. Thomas's
dressmaking shop. Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town
proprieties, and the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their
origin, became very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in
Lena's soft voice, with her caressing intonation and arch naivete.
Nothing could be more diverting than to hear Lena, who was almost as
candid as Nature, call a leg a 'limb' or a house a 'home.'

We used to linger a long while over our coffee in that sunny corner.
Lena was never so pretty as in the morning; she wakened fresh with the
world every day, and her eyes had a deeper colour then, like the blue
flowers that are never so blue as when they first open. I could sit idle
all through a Sunday morning and look at her. Ole Benson's behaviour was
now no mystery to me.

'There was never any harm in Ole,' she said once. 'People needn't have
troubled themselves. He just liked to come over and sit on the drawside
and forget about his bad luck. I liked to have him. Any company's
welcome when you're off with cattle all the time.'

'But wasn't he always glum?' I asked. 'People said he never talked at
all.'

'Sure he talked, in Norwegian. He'd been a sailor on an English boat and
had seen lots of queer places. He had wonderful tattoos. We used to sit
and look at them for hours; there wasn't much to look at out there. He
was like a picture book. He had a ship and a strawberry girl on one arm,
and on the other a girl standing before a little house, with a fence and
gate and all, waiting for her sweetheart. Farther up his arm, her sailor
had come back and was kissing her. "The Sailor's Return," he called it.'

I admitted it was no wonder Ole liked to look at a pretty girl once in a
while, with such a fright at home.

'You know,' Lena said confidentially, 'he married Mary because he
thought she was s