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And before they have had time to look round Garibaldi has put everything in order, and is sitting there working and looking across the room at the master, who is himself sewing to-day. And then Jeppe comes tumbling in, annoyed that no one has told him of Garibaldi's arrival. "'Day, master 'day, craft-master!" says Garibaldi, who stands up and bows.
If he himself was in the shop, talking to the people, his wife would sit in the living-room behind and hammer on a boot, so that it sounded as though there were men in the workshop. But at Shrovetide Jeppe received some orders. Master Andres came home quite cheerfully one day from Bjerhansen's cellar; there he had made the acquaintance of some of the actors of a troupe which had just arrived.
One day the skipper came in at the workshop door, banged a pair of shoes down on the window-bench, and went out again. They had been bought in England, and belonged to the helmsman of a bark which had just come into the harbor. The young master looked at them, turned them over in his hands, and looked at them again. Then he called Jeppe.
"For if they can make the one kind on a machine, they can make another. The handicraft is condemned to death, and we shall all be without bread one fine day! Well, I, thank God, have not many years before me." It was the first time that Jeppe had admitted that he owed his life to God. Every time he came into the workshop he began to expatiate on the same subject.
Little Nikas had to look out for something else; their means would not allow them to keep a journeyman. So Nikas decided to marry, and to set up as a master shoemaker in the north. The shoemaker of the Baptist community had just died, and he could get plenty of customers by joining the sect; he was already attending their services. "But go to work carefully!" said Jeppe. "Or matters will go awry!"
Jeppe was first cousin to the crazy Anker, but he preferred not to lay claim to the fact; the man could not help being mad, but he made his living, disgracefully enough, by selling sand in the streets a specialist in his way.
He fled across to the shelter of the wall, and hurried off; old Jorgen stood there gobbling with laughter as he watched him, his hands folded over his broomstick. "O Lord, is that a man?" he cried to Jeppe, who sat at his window, shaving himself before the milk-can. "Just look how he puffs! Now he'll go in and beg God to forgive him for going courting!"
There was no one under whose care he could leave Little Christina; so she was almost always with him in his boat, or playing in the wood among the blossoming heath, or picking the ripe wild berries. Sometimes, when her father had to go as far as the town, he would take Little Christina, who was a year younger than Ib, across the heath to the cottage of Jeppe Jans, and leave her there.
He never appeared in the workshop with his sack of sand; he was afraid of Jeppe, who was now the oldest member of the family. Elsewhere he went in and out everywhere with his clattering wooden shoes; and people bought of him, as they must have sand for their floors, and his was as good as any other.
"What's the matter with you this time, father?" he would ask wearily. Then Jeppe would break out into fulminations against the new times. If Master Andres and the journeyman were not present, the apprentices amused themselves by making the old man lose his temper; and this was not difficult, as he saw hostility in everything.
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