When she got the broom, she pounded on the floor and called “Lindquist!” so that people heard her far up the street. Lindquist came hastily up, his tailor’s sewing-ring on his finger and holding a needle with a long thread trailing from it. He must have thought that the house was on fire, he looked so frightened.
“See here!” said Madam Knoll in a quivering voice. “See here what your bad boy has done.” She laid the tortoise on its back and presented it to him in that manner, so that Lindquist should see at once how dead it was.
“What—what does this mean?” asked Lindquist, bewildered.
“Mean?” cried Madam Knoll. “It means that I shall move from here to-morrow, Lindquist, understand that. It means that your son has killed my tortoise.”
Madam Knoll talked louder and louder as she threatened Lindquist with both the police and the Parliament. Lindquist was utterly unable to make himself heard when he tried to speak, for Madam Knoll entirely out-talked him. My, but there was a hullabaloo in her attic that day!
But Madam Knoll did not move from his house as she had threatened to, after all, for she lives there even now.
Although the tortoise was dead when I found it, I got the music-box, nevertheless. It stands beside my bed. In the mornings everything has to go in such a tearing hurry that I have no time to think of music-boxes; but every night when I undress, I wind it up and then fall asleep while it plays, oh, so delicately and prettily, “Bim, bam! Bilibum, bum, bum!”
XII
PLAY ACTING
Oh, I am so angry with Otto, the woodcutter! for it was all his fault. Just because he was cross over Father’s having bought so much green wood, he had to——Well, I’m going to tell you all about it.
A better theater than our woodshed is not to be found in the whole town. Emil Rasmussen’s hall, where all the traveling actors play, can’t come up to our woodshed, that is certain. Of course I mean in the summer when there isn’t any wood there.