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Kalle stood squeezed among the hindmost chairs, and there he had to stay until everybody had passed out. "Yes, I was very anxious to take part in this great day," he said, "and I wanted to bring mother with me, but she thought her clothes weren't respectable enough." Kalle wore a new gray linsey-woolsey suit; he had grown smaller and more bent with the years.
Kalle brought in the old lady's arm-chair from her room, and made her sit down. "What's all that nonsense about?" he said reproachfully. "Why, you pay for yourself!" "Pay! Oh dear! They get twenty krones a year for keeping me," said the old woman to the company in general. The coffee came in, and Kalle poured brandy into the cups of all the elder people.
Now the young women sang, and it sounded just as if they were angels from heaven who had come to seal the bond. "We must take our places so that we can congratulate them," said Lasse, and he wanted to push right through the crowd, but Pelle held him back. "I'm afraid he won't know us to-day; but look now, there's Uncle Kalle."
"When we take Anna's too, it makes fourteen." "Oh, yes, count the others too, and you'll get off all the easier!" said Kalle teasingly. Lasse was looking at Anna's child, which lay side by side with Kalle's thirteenth. "She looks healthier than her aunt," he said. "You'd scarcely think they were the same age. She's just as red as the other's pale."
His wife protested, but only faintly; she was laughing all the time, and herself helped them to dress, while she kept on saying: "Oh, what foolishness! Upon my word, I never knew the like of it! Then this one shan't be left out either!" she added suddenly, drawing the youngest out of the alcove. "Then that's the eight," said Kalle, pointing to the flock. "They fill the room well, don't they?
"He is good, isn't he, mother?" said Kalle, stroking her face. "And so well-dressed he is too!" exclaimed Lasse. "Yes, he takes care of his money. He's not dissipated, like his father; and he's not afraid of parting with a ten-krone note when he's at home here on a visit."
"Your wife's Danish," said Lasse, admiringly. "And you've got a cow too?" "Yes, it's a biggish place here," said Kalle, drawing himself up. "There's a cat belonging to the establishment too, and as many rats as it cares to eat." His wife now appeared, breathless, and looking in astonishment at the visitors. "Yes, the midwife's gone again," said Kalle.
Lasse looked at him with disapproval. Kalle caught himself up, apparently very much horrified. "Eh, what nonsense I'm talking! She lost the blindness of that eye, I ought to have said. Isn't that all wrong, too? You put somebody's eye out, and she begins to see! Upon my word, I think I'll set up as an eye-doctor after this, for there's not much difficulty in it." "What do you say?
Anna entered in tears, and was attacked on all sides with surprised inquiries, to which her sobs were her only answer. "And you've been given a holiday to come and see us at Christmas time, and you come home crying! You are a nice one!" said Kalle, laughing. "You must give her something to suck, mother!" "I've lost my place," the girl at last got out between her sobs.
"Ye-es; we've managed to scrape together a few," said Kalle, running about in vain to get something for his visitors to sit upon; everything was being used as beds. "You'll have to spit on the floor and sit down on that," he said, laughing. His wife came in, however, with a washing-bench and an empty beer-barrel. "Sit you down and rest," she said, placing the seats round the table.
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