pillar of snow in its arms and danced out into the
plain, lifted one flake up to the clouds and chased another down
into a ditch. "It is so, it is so," said little Ruster; "while one
dances and whirls it is play, but when one must be buried in the
drift and forgotten, it is sorrow and grief." But down they all
have to go, and now it was his turn. To think that he had now come
to the end!

He no longer asked where the man was driving him; he thought that
he was driving in the land of death.

Little Ruster made no offerings to the gods that night. He did not
curse flute-playing or the life of a pensioner; he did not think
that it had been better for him if he had ploughed the earth or
sewn shoes. But he mourned that he was now a worn-out instrument,
which pleasure could no longer use. He complained of no one, for he
knew that when the horn is cracked and the guitar will not stay in
tune, they must go. He became all at once a very humble man. He
understood that it was the end of him, on this Christmas Eve.
Hunger and cold would destroy him, for he understood nothing, was
good for nothing and had no friends.

The sledge stops, and suddenly it is light about him, and he hears
friendly voices, and there is some one who is helping him into a
warm room, and some one who is pouring warm tea into him. His coat
is pulled off him, and several people cry that he is welcome, and
warm hands rub life into his benumbed fingers.

He was so confused by it all that he did not come to his senses for
nearly a quarter of an hour. He could not possibly comprehend that
he had come back to Loefdala. He had not been at all conscious that
the stable-boy had grown tired of driving about in the storm and
had turned home.

Nor did he understand why he was now so well received in Liljekrona's
house. He could not know that Liljekrona's wife understood what a
weary journey he had made that Christmas Eve, when he had been
turned away from every door where he had knocked. She felt such
compassion on him that she forgot her own troubles.

Liljekrona went on with the wild playing up in his room; he did not
know that Ruster had come. The latter sat meanwhile in the dining-room
with the wife and the children. The servants, who used also to be
there on Christmas Eve, had moved out into the kitchen away from
their mistress's trouble.

The mistress of the house lost no time in setting Ruster to work.
"You hear, I suppose," she said, "that Liljekrona do