Oleana did the washing for these summer guests and earned money that way, you see.
"It's just as if all this money were given to me!" said Oleana. "For our Lord fills the brooks with water and the work I put on the clothes is nothing to count."
There were beds everywhere in the one room of the hut, and what with shelves and clothes, wooden bowls and buckets and even shiny scrap-pictures on the walls, there wasn't a vacant spot anywhere. The floor was shiningly clean, however, and strewn with juniper boughs, and the sun shone cheerily through the greenish window-panes, on Grandmother and the nine tow-headed children, and all.
Oleana had been married twenty-one years and in all that time had never owned a clock. Through the long darkness of the winter afternoons and evenings, when the snow lay thick and heavy on the pine-trees round about, and the roads were blocked in every direction with high drifts, there they would be in the hut;—Oleana and Grandmother and the nine tow-heads and the husband without much sense under his hat,—and not even the clever Oleana would have the remotest idea what o'clock it was. In summer she looked at the sun to tell the time, and on clear winter nights at the stars; though to see these, she had to get up in the cold and breathe on the thickly frosted window-pane to make a space to peep through.
One day while I was at Henrik-hut talking with Oleana, it occurred to me that we summer-boarder-children might put our money together and buy a clock for Oleana. The grown-up people wanted to help, and so we got a lot of money; and a big clock with a white dial and red roses was bought in the city.
Then it was such fun surprising Oleana with it! We had an awfully jolly time. A message was sent to her asking her to come to Goodfields; and down she came with her hair wet and smooth, and a clean stiff working-dress on, but having no notion what we wanted of her.
The clock had been hung up in the hall at Goodfields and its shining brass pendulum was swinging with a slow and sure tick-tock. All the ladies stood around and I was to present the clock.
"Oleana," said I, "we wanted to give you a clock;—and that's it."
Oleana looked as if the sky had fallen.
"Oh no, no, no!" she cried. "It isn't possible—of course not! Why should I have that clock?"