After the little party for Buchholtz, the judge's chief clerk, on Thursday, he was much worse. He went about unhappy, and saw loss and neglect and erroneous reckonings in all quarters.
There was no help for it, a messenger must go now after the parish clerk, Öjseth.
Besides his clerical duties, he taught the youth, vaccinated, and let blood.
What he was good for in the first named direction shall be left unsaid; but in the last it could safely be said that he had very much, nay, barrels, of the blood of the district on his conscience, and not least that of the full-blooded captain, whom he had bled regularly now for a series of years.
The effect was magnificent. After the sultry and oppressive stormy and pessimistic mood, which filled, so to speak, every groove in the house and oppressed all faces, even down to Pasop—a brilliant fair weather, jokes with Thinka, and wild plans that the family should go down in the summer and see the manoeuvres.
It was at the point of complete good humor that Ma resolutely seized the opportunity to speak about Jörgen's going to school—all that Aunt Alette had offered of board and lodging, and what she thought could be managed otherwise.
There was a reckoning and studying, with demonstration and counter-demonstration, down to the finest details of the cost of existence in the city.
The captain represented the items of expenditure and the debit side in the form of indignant questions and conjectures for every single one, as to whether she wanted to ruin him, and Ma stubbornly and persistently defended the credit side, while she went over and went over again all the items to be deducted.
When, time after time, things whirled round and round in the continual repetition, so that she got confused, there were bad hours before she succeeded in righting herself in the storm.