I could not scream any more, I was so strangely weak. Then I heard many feet in the kitchen above my head. They came nearer, and down the stairs, and then the door was opened. All I could do now was to call very faintly.
"Oh! Mother, Mother!"
At the same instant the lid of the meal chest was quickly thrown open. There stood Mother and Maren and Ingeborg, the cook. Mother lifted me out; I was crying so hard I could not say a word, nor explain at all how it happened. However, a little while after I was as lively as ever.
"Oh, you ugly Maren—who wouldn't help me!"
"I thought it was a shriek from the underworld!" said Maren. "And I was so frightened! It clutched my heart. Oh! I shall never get over it." Maren sat on the corner of the potato bin and wept aloud.
Mother didn't know whether to scold Maren or to laugh at her. She behaved exactly as if it were she and not I who had been shut up in the meal chest.
Maren took surely a hundred Hofmann's drops and still she was poorly, and for many days she whimpered and whined about her fright at the meal chest. And even yet she cannot hear any mention of meal, or of a chest or of screaming, without her invariably saying:
"Yes, it's a wonder that I didn't get my death that time you were shut up in the meal chest—but I've had a swollen heart ever since then—and that I can thank you for."
But Mother says that's all nonsense.