Oh, that pleasant old living-room at the Parsonage! It has a low ceiling, and all the walls are crowded with pictures. There are Luther and Melancthon, and the King in Leire and Gustavus Adolphus and Wellington and Bishop Gislesen and his wife, and Skipper Marenssen from down on the shore, and William of Orange with his crown and sceptre. Uncle goes around and talks to them sometimes as if they were alive and could answer him.
There are green woven pieces over the sofas and chairs, and the windows are full of fuchsias, always in bloom. Great-Aunt and Aunt Magda sit, each on her own side of a table between the windows.
Great-Aunt has many interesting things in her work-box, a basket carved from a cherrystone, a corkscrew as little as a fly, and other queer things. I look at them when Great-Aunt is out. I should not dare to at any other time.
The door stood open, and summer fragrance was wafted in. Between the white rails of the garden fence, I could see bunches of currants, clear and red, and I knew that in the garden there were raspberries as big as the cook’s thimble, and garden strawberries so big they had the distinction of being laid out on pieces of roof tiles to ripen. Hurrah! What a good time we should have! Suddenly I sprang up and for pure joy leaped down the steps four or five at a time to the grass below.
“See that now!” said the old lawyer still sitting on the steps. “And I had thought you a grown-up young lady!” This embarrassed me a little, but I pretended not to notice it.
The whole of the first day, I went about visiting the places and the people I had known the year before. First, I went to the men’s room to see Jon. He was poorly, he said, and had a stitch in his side a foot long. It was a great deal worse because he had had to row out to the steamer for us,—which he needn’t have done if children only stayed in their own homes as was proper, he thought. He was not so very polite,—he usually isn’t—but I never trouble myself in the least about that.
“Oh, you’ll be all right soon, Jon,” I said.
“Humph! It would be pretty bad for other folk if I weren’t,” said Jon, looking much offended.
Later I was in the henhouse and saw a hen sitting on her nest, and in the pig-pen where I scratched a pig’s back with a stick. “Piggy, piggy, piggy!” “Uf, uf, uf,” said the pig. Then I went to the cow-house and the barn, and last of all to the churchyard,—the church is right near the Parsonage, you see,—where I went around and read all the verses on the gravestones, although I knew most of them by heart.
It is an awfully pleasant churchyard, with big, plump maple-trees, through which the sunlight falls in flecks and patches on the tall grass and sunken graves, where the old sailors and their wives lie buried. Some have beautiful gravestones with verses on them which Uncle wrote. Round the churchyard is a very broad stone wall. Karsten and I get up on it and play tag there.