Early in the morning Hansel,
with a dozen other young fellows of the neighborhood, had marched away
to the music of fife and drum, and there was no knowing when they
would come back again. A dismal whitish fog had been hovering about
the fields all day long, but had changed toward evening into a fine
drizzling rain,--one of those slow, hopeless rains that seem to have
no beginning and no end. Old Mother Uberta, who, although she
pretended to be greatly displeased at Ilka's matrimonial choice,
persisted in holding her responsible for all her lover's follies, had
been going about the house grumbling and scolding since the early
dawn.

"Humph," said Mother Uberta, as she lighted a pine-knot and stuck it
into a crack in the wall (for it was already dark, and candles were
expensive), "it is a great sin and shame--the lad is neither crooked
nor misshapen--the Lord has done well enough by him, Heaven knows; and
yet never a stroke of work has he done since his poor father went out
of the world as naked as he came into it. A shiftless, fiddling, and
galavanting set they have always been, and me then as has only this
one lass, givin' her away, with my eyes wide open, into misery."

Ilka, who was sitting before the open fire-place mingling her furtive
tears with the wool she was carding, here broke into a loud sob, and
hid her face in her hands.

"You always say mean things to me, mother, when Hansel is away,"
sobbed she, "but when he is here, you let on as if you liked him ever
so much."

The mother recognized this as a home-thrust, and wisely kept silent.
She wet her finger-tips, twirled the thread, stopped the wheel,
inspected some point in its mechanism with a scowl of intense
preoccupation, and then spun on again with a severe concentration of
interest as if lovers were of small consequence compared to
spinning-wheels. Mother Uberta was a tall, stately woman of fifty,
with a comely wrinkled face, and large, well-modelled features. You
saw at once that life was a serious business to her, and that she gave
herself no quarter.

"Humph!" she began after awhile with that indefinable interjection of
displeasure which defies all spelling. "You talk like the witless
creature that you are. Didn't I tell the lad, two years ago,
Michaelmas was, that the day he could pay off the mortgage on the
farm, he should have you and the farm too? And eight hundred and fifty
florins oughtn't to frighten a man as has got the right spirit in