ople you have among you, until they are
dead," remarked Mother Baekken. "If he had been the poor man's friend,
they could have sung and trumpeted a little about it while he lived.
Perhaps that's turned the wrong way, but--" she slowly, and with
increasing expression, bent her face over her cup.

Mother Baekken must always have her own interpretations, so Mother
Taraldsen discreetly warded off a disturbance of the peace by striking
into the very middle of the manufacturing part of the town. She had come
up the streets yesterday evening with a covered cup containing leeches,
and you might really think that if, all that long way up from the
chemist's, you had escaped rogues and robbers, you ought to go free up
here. But there came those great, grown-up girls, flying one after
another along a slide down the street, screaming and shouting, so that
it was enough to knock people down. So she had dropped the cup with all
five leeches in it, and if it had not been moonlight so that she could
see to pick them up again on the snow, she would have lost every single
one. It was that Josefa and Gunda and Kalla down the street, and that
long Silla--she came along like a ghost. Ah, Mrs. Holman, who is so
particular, should see what sort of a daughter she has, when it gets
dark.

Barbara nodded to herself, and thought that Nikolai should just hear
what people said.

"I must really go out and look at them one evening, yes indeed. Well,
that about the leeches I disapprove of entirely and altogether, I must
confess. But young blood must have movement in some way, and may I
ask,"--here Mother Baekken laid one fore-finger upon the other--"have
they any way of amusing themselves, if they must _not_ dance, and _not_
slide, and _not_ toboggan?"

But now Mother Taraldsen grew angry.

"If it's proper for respectable young girls to tear about and make a
row, it must be the new fashion that Mother Baekken's preaching about. If
you kept a careful watch at the corners, you might perhaps see that
there were those who were out to meet the flock of geese."

"Then it would be better if you came down on _them_ instead of the poor
girls," replied Mother Baekken obstinately; "a man like that clerk down
at the contractor's, and him at the Stores, and then that fine clerk,
that Veyergang up at the factory and his friends."

Barbara was standing at the counter with a customer.

Nobody must say anything against her Ludvig. She knew him; she had been
w