en.

And Inger answers: "Best if you'd say it yourself. He won't do as I
say."

Very well, then, Isak is head of the house, so he should think; now
see if Eleseus dares to murmur! But, whether it were because he feared
defeat, Isak draws back now, and says: "Ay, 'tis true, I might say a
word of it myself. But by reason of having so many things to do, and
busy with this and that, I've something else to think of."

"Well ...?" said Inger in surprise.

And Isak goes off again--not very far, only to the farther fields, but
still, he goes off. He is full of mysteries, and must hide himself out
of the way. The fact is this: he had brought back a third piece of
news from the village today, and that was something more than the
rest, something enormous; and he had hidden it at the edge of the
wood. There it stands, wrapped up in sacking and paper; he uncovers
it, and lo, a huge machine. Look! red and blue, wonderful to see, with
a heap of teeth and a heap of knives, with joints and arms and screws
and wheels--a mowing-machine. No, Isak would not have gone down today
for the new horse if it hadn't been for that machine.

He stands with a marvellously keen expression, going over in his mind
from beginning to end the instructions for use that the storekeeper
had read out; he sets a spring here, and shifts a bolt there, then he
oils every hole and every crevice, then he looks over the whole thing
once more. Isak had never known such an hour in his life. To pick up a
pen and write one's mark on a paper, a document--ay, 'twas a perilous
great thing that, no doubt. Likewise in the matter of a new harrow he
had once brought up--there were many curiously twisted parts in that
to be considered. Not to speak of the great circular saw that had to
be set in its course to the nicety of a pencil line, never
swaying east nor west, lest it should fly asunder. But this--this
mowing-machine of his--'twas a crawling nest of steel springs and
hooks and apparatus, and hundreds of screws--Inger's sewing-machine
was a bookmarker compared with this!

Isak harnessed himself to the shafts and tried the thing. Here was the
wonderful moment. And that was why he kept out of sight and was his
own horse.

For--what if the machine had been wrongly put together and did not do
its work, but went to pieces with a crash! No such calamity happened,
however; the machine could cut grass. And so indeed it ought, after
Isak had stood there, deep in study, for h