ay: "We have investigated everything, everything; now,
earth, we will bore down to your very centre."

But one who will not still be there is little, round Petter Nord:
the little fellow from Vaermland, you know, who was in Halfvorson's
shop; he who amused the customers with his small mechanical
inventions and his white mice. There is a long story about him.
There are stories to be told about everything and everybody in the
town. Nowhere else do such wonderful things happen.

He was a peasant boy, little Petter Nord. He was short and round;
he was brown-eyed and smiling. His hair was paler than birch leaves
in the autumn; his cheeks were red and downy. And he was from
Vaermland. No one, seeing him, could imagine that he was from any
other place. His native land had equipped him with its excellent
qualities. He was quick at his work, nimble with his fingers, ready
with his tongue, clear in his thoughts. And, moreover, full of fun,
good-natured and brave, kind and quarrelsome, inquisitive and a
chatterbox. A madcap, he never could show more respect to a
burgomaster than to a beggar! But he had a heart; he fell in love
every other day, and confided in the whole town.

This child of rich gifts attended to the work in the shop in rather
an extraordinary manner. The customers were waited on while he fed
the white mice. Money was changed and counted while he put wheels
on his little automatic wagons. And while he told the customers of
his very last love-affair, he kept his eye on the quart measure,
into which the brown molasses was slowly curling. It delighted his
admiring listeners to see him suddenly leap over the counter and
rush out into the street to have a brush with a passing street-boy;
also to see him calmly return to tie the string on a package or to
finish measuring a piece of cloth.

Was it not quite natural that he should be the favorite of the
whole town? We all felt obliged to trade with Halfvorson, after
Petter Nord came there. Even the old Mayor himself was proud when
Petter Nord took him apart into a dark corner and showed him the
cages of the white mice. It was nervous work to show the mice, for
Halfvorson had forbidden him to have them in the shop.

But then in the brightening February there came a few days of warm,
misty weather. Petter Nord became suddenly serious and silent. He
let the white mice nibble the steel bars of their cages without
feeding them. He attended to his duties in the most irrepr