ith him day and night for fourteen years. If she only had a halfpenny
for every time he had cried and screamed for Barbara!

She would have enlarged upon the subject, if it had not been for the man
at her back who was calling out for his soft soap.

So cup-and-leech-Mother Taraldsen went on, saying that the girls stood
poking their heads out of every single gate the whole way up the street;
she saw it so well when she came home from applying leeches of an
evening.

She and Anne Graves then began to review the young people more closely.
There were some they would not even mention, and some they named with
all sorts of interesting doubts and opinions, and lastly some they only
stopped to wonder that they had nothing whatever to say either about or
against.

As to Barbara, she noticed carefully what was said about Silla, and made
up her mind that Nikolai should be warned; he should at any rate know
what he was doing when he went and took that girl.

And neither was it with a diminishing-glass she let him see it, as time
after time she referred to all the dangers the young factory-girls up
there were exposed to. She had sufficient instinct not to mention Silla,
so that he should not think she was speaking against her. But every time
she touched upon it, she saw well, that it went into Nikolai, and had
fully the effect she wished.

Barbara had made some of these remarks this evening too, and Nikolai was
sitting gloomily listening to the noise outside.

One party after another was flying past down the high-road on sledges,
like shadows in the moonlight, with shouts and cries--half-grown lads
and lassies, and now and then a party of fine people from the town
below. One tall lad, with the rope over his shoulder and his heels
digging into the hillside, was dragging a wood-sledge up, with a heavy
load of girls upon it.

Nikolai could not help keeping watch through the kitchen window, and
left his mother, who sat inside by the paraffins lamp, without any
answer.

They were Kristofa and Kalla, those two who were standing there in the
street talking, while they slid backwards and forwards the whole time on
a little bit of ice. They were waiting for somebody--Silla perhaps; they
were standing close by her street. It was a question which of them would
dare to venture in and be so bold as to ask Mrs. Holman with many "dear,
kind, goods" if she would allow Silla to go over to her for a little
while this evening--always untrut