she
looked out of the window. "The poor woman can hardly drag herself along,
and she must now drag the pail home from the fountain. Be a good boy,
Tukey, and run across and help the old woman, won't you?"

So Tuk ran over quickly and helped her; but when he came back again into
the room it was quite dark, and as to a light, there was no thought of
such a thing. He was now to go to bed; that was an old turn-up bedstead;
in it he lay and thought about his geography lesson, and of Zealand, and
of all that his master had told him. He ought, to be sure, to have read
over his lesson again, but that, you know, he could not do. He therefore
put his geography-book under his pillow, because he had heard that was
a very good thing to do when one wants to learn one's lesson; but one
cannot, however, rely upon it entirely. Well, there he lay, and thought
and thought, and all at once it was just as if someone kissed his eyes
and mouth: he slept, and yet he did not sleep; it was as though the old
washerwoman gazed on him with her mild eyes and said, "It were a great
sin if you were not to know your lesson tomorrow morning. You have aided
me, I therefore will now help you; and the loving God will do so at all
times." And all of a sudden the book under Tuk's pillow began scraping
and scratching.

"Kickery-ki! kluk! kluk! kluk!"--that was an old hen who came creeping
along, and she was from Kjoge. "I am a Kjoger hen," [*] said she, and then
she related how many inhabitants there were there, and about the battle
that had taken place, and which, after all, was hardly worth talking
about.

* Kjoge, a town in the bay of Kjoge. "To see the Kjoge
hens," is an expression similar to "showing a child London,"
which is said to be done by taking his head in both bands,
and so lifting him off the ground. At the invasion of the
English in 1807, an encounter of a no very glorious nature
took place between the British troops and the undisciplined
Danish militia.

"Kribledy, krabledy--plump!" down fell somebody: it was a wooden bird,
the popinjay used at the shooting-matches at Prastoe. Now he said that
there were just as many inhabitants as he had nails in his body; and he
was very proud. "Thorwaldsen lived almost next door to me.* Plump! Here
I lie capitally."

* Prastoe, a still smaller town than Kjoge. Some hundred paces from
it lies the manor-house Ny Soe, where Thorwaldsen, the famed sculptor,
generally so