she gadded round the town upon very various
errands.

Mam Hansen would never listen to these stories; she merely waved them
off. She paid just as little attention to the advice of her female
friends and neighbours, when they said:

'Let the children shift for themselves--really, they're quite brazen
enough to do it--and take in a couple of paying lodgers.'

'No, no,' Mam Hansen would reply; 'as long as they have some kind of a
home with me, the police will not get a firm grip of them, and they will
not quite flow over.'

This idea, that the bairns should not quite 'flow over,' had grown and
grown in her puny brain, until it had become the last point, around
which gathered everything motherly that could be left, after a life like
hers.

And therefore she slaved on, scolded and slapped the children when they
came late home, made their bed, gave them a little food, and so held
them to her, in some kind of fashion.

Mam Hansen had tried many things in the course of her life, and
everything had brought her gradually downward, from servant-girl to
waitress, down past washerwoman to what she now was.

Early in the mornings, before it was light, she would come over
Knippelsbro [Footnote: Bro, a bridge.] into the town, with a heavy
basket upon each arm. Out of the baskets stuck cabbage-leaves and
carrot-tops, so that one would suppose that she made a business of
buying vegetables from the peasants out at Amager, in order to sell them
in Aabenraa and the surrounding quarters.

All the same, it was not a greengrocery business that she carried on,
but, on the contrary, a little coal business: she sold coals
clandestinely and in small portions to poor folk like herself.

This evident incongruity was not noticed in Aabenraa; not even Policeman
Frode Hansen seemed to find anything remarkable about Mam Hansen's
business. When he met her in the mornings, toiling along with the heavy
baskets, he usually asked quite genially: 'Well, my little Mam Hansen,
were the roots cheap to-day?'

And, if his greeting were less friendly than usual, he was treated to a
half of lager later in the day.

This was a standing outlay of Madam Hansen's, and she had one besides.
Every evening she bought a large piece of sugared Vienna bread. She did
not eat it herself; neither was it for the children; no one knew what
she did with it, nor did anybody particularly care.

* * * * *

When there was no prospect of ha