as a parting token.

Karin pressed the little stranger to her mother's heart, and thanked
God that he was left to her care.

So the little Italian came to the golden house--the black eyes among
the blue.

CHAPTER II.

KARIN'S FLOCK.

There was a family group in the big room at the golden house. The
mother sat in the centre, with the brown baby on her knee. The heads
of the six fair-haired children were bent down over the new treasure
like a cluster of rough-hewn angels in the Bethlehem scene, as carved
out by some reverent artist of old. With a puzzled, half-pleased
glance the stalwart father looked down upon them all, like a benignant
giant.

"Is he really our own little baby now?" said one of the children.

"What shall we call him?" asked another.

"We'll name him, of course, after the bear," said the oldest boy, who
liked to take the lead in the family. "I heard the man call him
Pionono, and he said the bear knew his name."

"We won't call him after that horrid bear!" exclaimed Karin.

"Uncle Bjoern is as nice as anybody, and his name is just 'bear,'" urged
one of the boys.

"Don't contrary your mother," said Jan decidedly. "Pionono is too long
a name. We'll call him Nono, and that's a nice name, to my thinking."

"A nice, pretty little name," said the mother, "and I like it."

And so the matter was settled. The little brown baby was to be called
after a pope and bear, in Protestant Sweden. Nono (the ninth) suited
him better than any one around him suspected. The tiny Italian was
really the ninth baby that had come to the golden house. Karin had now
six children. She had laid her firstborn in the grave long ago, and
lately her little Gustaf had been placed beside him in the churchyard.

Classification simplified matters in Karin's family, as elsewhere. The
children were divided by common consent into three pairs, known as the
boys, the twins, and the little boys. For each division the laws and
privileges were fixed and unalterable. "The boys," Erik and Oke, were
the oldest pair. Erik was at present a smaller edition of his father,
with a fair promise of a full development in the same direction. Now,
at twelve years of age, he was almost as tall as his mother, and could
have mastered her at any time in a fair fight. Oke, a year younger,
was pale, and slight, and stooping, with a thin, straight nose, quite
out of keeping with the large, strongly-marked features of the rest of
th