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 irreproachable way.  He fought with no more street boys.  Could Petter Nord not bear the change in the weather?

Oh no, the matter was that he had found a fifty-crown note on one of the shelves.  He believed that it had got caught in a piece of cloth, and without any one’s seeing him he had pushed it under a roll of striped cotton which was out of fashion and was never taken down from the shelf.

The boy was cherishing great anger in his heart against Halfvorson.  The latter had destroyed a, whole family of mice for him, and now he meant to be revenged.  Before his eyes he still saw the white mother with her helpless offspring.  She had not made the slightest attempt to escape; she had remained in her place with steadfast heroism, staring with red, burning eyes on the heartless murderer.  Did he not deserve a short time of anxiety?  Petter Nord wished to see him come out pale as death from his office and begin to look for the fifty crowns.  He wished to see the same despair in his watery eyes as he had seen in the ruby red ones of the white mouse.  The shopkeeper should search, he should turn the whole shop upside down before Petter Nord would let him find the bank-note.

But the fifty crowns lay in its hiding-place all day without any one’s asking about it.  It was a new note, many-colored and bright, and had big numbers in all the corners.  When Petter Nord was alone in the shop, he put a step-ladder against the shelves and climbed up to the roll of cotton.  Then he took out the fifty crowns, unfolded it and admired its beauties.

In the midst of the most eager trade he would grow anxious lest something should have happened to the fifty crowns.  Then he pretended to look for something on the shelf, and groped about under the roll of cotton till he felt the smooth bank-note rustle under his fingers.