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Updated: May 6, 2025
"Perhaps he's not expecting any glad tidings, seeing it's Senator Carl Carlson who is paying him a call." This from the seine-maker. The senator turned his head and stared at the seine-maker. "Ol' Bengtsa of Lusterby has not always been so afraid of meeting Carl Carlson of Storvik," he observed in a mild voice. Turning toward the table again, he took up a letter. Every one was dumbfounded.
The little girl had heard that some well-do-to people had offered the seine-maker a home for life, but in preference he had gone to live with his daughter-in-law, who made her home here in the Ashdales, so as to help her in any way that he could; she had many children, and her husband, who had deserted her, was now supposed to be dead.
Perhaps Glory Goldie had written to him? It was quite possible that something so great had come to the little girl that she dared not send direct word to her parents, and wrote instead to the seine-maker, asking him to prepare them. "He'll come again to-morrow," thought Jan, "and then we'll hear all about it." But for some reason the seine-maker did not come back the next day, nor the day after.
It would hardly have been possible for any one to be as fond of the little girl as her father was; but it may be truly said that she had a very good friend in old seine-maker Ola. This is the way they came to be friends: Glory Goldie had taken to setting out fishing-poles in the brook for the small salmon-trout that abounded there.
"We had greetings from her only a fortnight ago in her letter to the senator," Katrina reminded him. The seine-maker blew into his saucer a couple of times before saying anything more. Whereupon he again found it expedient to bridge a long silence with a word or so. "Maybe some blessing has come to the girl, and it has given her something to write about."
Folks wondered, of course, how two people who were so pitiably poor could afford to give a big feast, but to all who knew the whys and wherefores it seemed perfectly natural. As a matter of fact, when the seine-maker was a rich man he gave his two sons a farmstead each. The elder son wasted his substance in much the same way as Ol' Bengtsa himself had done, and died poor.
She must see for herself how he had put on his working clothes and gone out as a day labourer as soon as she let him know that such was her wish. He could not speak of this matter to either Katrina or the seine-maker. He would be patient and wait for some positive sign from Glory Goldie. Many times he had felt it to be so near that he had only to put out his hand and take it.
"For that I have to thank my good friend Ol' Bengtsa!" said Jan, with an air of mystery. "He's the one who has cured me." Jan said good-bye, and left at once. For a long while the seine-maker sat gazing out after him. "I don't know what he can have meant by saying that I have cured him," the old man remarked to his daughter-in-law. "It can't be that he's ? No, no!"
"So you're the one who comes here and takes my fish!" she said. "It's a good thing I've run across you at last so we can put a stop to this stealing." The man then raised his head, and now Glory Goldie saw his face. It was the old seine-maker, who was one of their neighbours.
He could not blame them for envying him. Indeed not! Just the same he felt it was wisest not to make them draw comparisons. And of course he could not ask men like Börje and the seine-maker to address him as Emperor. Such old friends could call him Jan, as they had always done; for they could never bring themselves to do otherwise.
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