“You never know what sort of people you have among you, until they are dead,” remarked Mother Baekken.  “If he had been the poor man’s friend, they could have sung and trumpeted a little about it while he lived.  Perhaps that’s turned the wrong way, but—­” she slowly, and with increasing expression, bent her face over her cup.

Mother Baekken must always have her own interpretations, so Mother Taraldsen discreetly warded off a disturbance of the peace by striking into the very middle of the manufacturing part of the town.  She had come up the streets yesterday evening with a covered cup containing leeches, and you might really think that if, all that long way up from the chemist’s, you had escaped rogues and robbers, you ought to go free up here.  But there came those great, grown-up girls, flying one after another along a slide down the street, screaming and shouting, so that it was enough to knock people down.  So she had dropped the cup with all five leeches in it, and if it had not been moonlight so that she could see to pick them up again on the snow, she would have lost every single one.  It was that Josefa and Gunda and Kalla down the street, and that long Silla—­she came along like a ghost.  Ah, Mrs. Holman, who is so particular, should see what sort of a daughter she has, when it gets dark.

Barbara nodded to herself, and thought that Nikolai should just hear what people said.

“I must really go out and look at them one evening, yes indeed.  Well, that about the leeches I disapprove of entirely and altogether, I must confess.  But young blood must have movement in some way, and may I ask,”—­here Mother Baekken laid one fore-finger upon the other—­“have they any way of amusing themselves, if they must not dance, and not slide, and not toboggan?”

But now Mother Taraldsen grew angry.

“If it’s proper for respectable young girls to tear about and make a row, it must be the new fashion that Mother Baekken’s preaching about.  If you kept a careful watch at the corners, you might perhaps see that there were those who were out to meet the flock of geese.”

“Then it would be better if you came down on them instead of the poor girls,” replied Mother Baekken obstinately; “a man like that clerk down at the contractor’s, and him at the Stores, and then that fine clerk, that Veyergang up at the factory and his friends.”

Barbara was standing at the counter with a customer.

Nobody must say anything against her Ludvig.  She knew him; she had been with 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.