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Updated: May 13, 2025
Clara was waltzing with little Eric when Nils came up to them, brushed his brother aside, and swung her out among the dancers. "Remember how we used to waltz on rollers at the old skating rink in town? I suppose people don't do that any more. We used to keep it up for hours. You know, we never did moon around as other boys and girls did. It was dead serious with us from the beginning.
"Are you the son?" he queried. "I have heard many bad reports of him. But you have such a good face, I couldn't believe that you were he, did I not know that he was transformed into an elf." "I know that I left a bad name behind me when I went away from the farm," admitted Nils Holgersson. "My own mother thinks I am a thief. But what matters it I sha'n't tarry here long.
There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do that. You'd be better off tramping the roads with me than you are here." Nils held back her head and looked into her eyes. "But I'm not that kind of a tramp, Clara. You won't have to take in sewing.
Now, by what sort of magic had he got to know of my little walk up there already? Ragnhild, of course, at her old tricks again it could be no one else. There was no doing anything with that girl. But now, as it happened, Nils was at hand this time, as he had been the time before. He came strolling over innocently from the kitchen, and in a moment Lars's anger was turned upon him instead.
From the forecastle below came wafted up a sentimental sailor's song, the burden of which was pretty well summed up in the two concluding lines: "But never more her name I'll utter till I die, For rosy though her lips were, her heart it was a lie." It sounded melancholy at that hour, and Nils, to judge from the occasional sighs with which he had accompanied it, was moved.
This horse and rider, with their free, rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to be seen on the face of the flat country. They seemed, in the last sad light of evening, not to be there accidentally, but as an inevitable detail of the landscape. Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving speck against the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed the hill.
He carried one of the glasses to his daughter and presented it with great gallantry. Clara shook her head, but, seeing her father's disappointment, relented. "You taste it first. I don't want so much." Joe sampled it with a beatific expression, and turned to Nils. "You drink him slow, dis wine. He very soft, but he go down hot. You see!"
Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and quite embarrassed little Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and hands at the tin basin. While he was parting his wet hair at the kitchen looking glass, a heavy tread sounded on the stairs. The boy dropped his comb. "Gracious, there's Mother. We must have talked too long."
Medicines and opiates were sent forward by the lady, but, though they eased the chap, they were powerless to salvage his wrecked body. Newman said Nils' ribs were sticking into his lungs. Lindquist went aft to ask permission to move the boy to the cabin, where the lady could nurse him. Swope blackguarded the man, and Fitzgibbon kicked him forward.
Moreover, he consoled himself with the reflection that if he attained the goal of his own desires he could easily bestow upon them, of his bounty, a reasonable prospect of long life and happiness. You see Nils was by no means so good yet as he ought to be.
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