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When the workmen arrived at the foundry in the morning there was hammering going on already in the little room. And when they left in the evening, the master had not stopped working yet. When the good citizens of Ringeby went to bed, they would look out of their windows and see his light still burning. Peer had had plenty to tire him out even before he began work here.
Ringeby lay on the shore of a great lake; and was one of those busy commercial towns which have sprung up in the last fifty years from a nucleus consisting of a saw-mill and a flour-mill by the side of a waterfall.
There had been a family council at Ringeby, and they had agreed that some definite arrangement must be made for the future of the sister and her husband, with whom things had gone so hopelessly wrong. As he turned up the by-road that led to the farm, he was aware of a man in his shirt-sleeves, wheeling a barrow full of stones. What? He thought could he be mistaken?
Christmas Eve came, and the grey farm-pony dragged up a big wooden case to the door. Peer opened it and carried in the things a whole heap of good things for Christmas from the Ringeby relations. He bit his lips when he saw all the bags piled up on the kitchen table.
"Freedom, freedom," was his idea; "lots of elbow-room room to turn about in without with your leave or by your leave to father or anyone! Your health!" A week later the street outside Lorentz D. Uthoug's house in Ringeby was densely crowded with people, all gazing up at the long rows of lighted windows. There was feasting to-night in the great man's house.
Yet for all this, Lorentz Uthoug was not altogether content. True, he was head and shoulders above all the Ringeby folks, but what he really wanted was to be the biggest man in a place a hundred times as large.
Now quite a number of modern factories had spread upwards along the river, and the place was a town with some four thousand inhabitants, with a church of its own, a monster of a school building, and numbers of yellow workmen's dwellings scattered about at random in every direction. Otherwise Ringeby was much like any other little town.
He has soon learned that a merchant named Uthoug, from Ringeby, is living in the house on the island, with his wife and daughter. And what of it? Often he would lie in his boat, smoking his pipe, and giving himself up to quiet dreams that came and passed.
There were two lawyers, who fought for scraps of legal business, and the editors of two local papers, who were constantly at loggerheads before the Conciliation Board. There was a temperance lodge and Workers' Union and a chapel and a picture palace. And every Sunday afternoon the good citizens of Ringeby walked out along the fjord, with their wives on their arms.
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