XII
OLD NICK
"This where Petter Nekkelsen lives?"
The speaker was an awkward-looking lad, acting as postman in Strandvik for the first time.
"No, you muddlehead." Old Lawyer Nickelsen held out his hand for the letters. "This is where Peder, comma, N. Nickelsen, full stop, lives. And a nice lot of louts they've got going around, that can't learn to call folk by their proper names!"
Thor Smith, the magistrate's clerk, was of the same opinion, but liked a touch of honest dialect occasionally; he was not unwilling on occasion to contradict Old Nick.
"Honest dialect, indeed! Rank impertinence, I call it! But wait a bit, young fellow; in a few years' time you'll be wishing these understrappers at the North Pole, or some other cool place."
The two men filled their pipes, and took up their position on the veranda of Lawyer Nickelsen's house, continuing their discussion as to the merits of natural simplicity, concerning which they held diametrically opposite views.
The lawyer was a bachelor of sixty-seven, and kept what he called a home for young men of decent behaviour and tolerable manners. In particular he had, ever since he first came to the place forty-three years earlier, kept open house for the magistrate's clerks successively, taking them under his paternal care and protection from their first entering on their duties in the town.
Smith and Nickelsen sat on the veranda, but somehow the discussion fell curiously flat. Smith was unusually absent and uncommunicative, to such a degree that Nickelsen at last asked him point blank what was the matter.