"Do I look tolerably well, Peter, so I can properly appear before your wife?" he said, running his hand through his black curly hair.
"Yes, yes, fine enough—devilish fine-looking fellow, Lieutenant.—If you please, gentlemen. Captain Rönnow and Lieutenant Mein, Ma," he said, as he opened the door.
The mistress of the house rose from her place at the table, where she was now sitting with fine white knitting-work. She greeted Captain Rönnow as heartily as her stiff figure would allow, and the lieutenant somewhat critically. It was the governor's sister to whom the salaam was made, as Captain Rönnow afterwards expressed it—an old, great family.
She disappeared a little later into domestic affairs, to "get them something for supper."
Captain Rönnow rubbed his hands from the cold, wheeled around on one leg on the floor, and thus placed himself with his back to the stove. "I tell you we are frozen stiff, Peter,—but—Oh, Lieutenant, bring in the case of bottles."
When Lieutenant Mein came in again, Rönnow took a sealed bottle with a label, and held it, swinging by the neck, before the captain.
"Look at it, Peter Jäger! Look well at it!" and he moved over towards his friend. "Genuine arrack from Atschin in hither—farther—East—or West India. I present it to you. May it melt your heart, Peter Jäger!"
"Hot water and sugar, Ma!" shouted the captain out into the kitchen, "then we shall soon know whether you only mean to deceive us simple country folks with stories. And out with the whist-table till we have supper! We can play three-handed whist with a dummy."
"Brrr-rr-whew, what kind of stuff is it you've got in your tobacco box, Jäger?" said Captain Rönnow, who was filling his pipe at it; "powder, sneezing powder, I believe! Smell it, Lieutenant. It must be tansy from the nursery."
"Tideman's three crown, fellow! We can't endure your leaf tobacco and Virginia up here in the mountain districts," came from Jäger, who was pulling out and opening the card-table. "Only look at the next box under the lead cover, and you will find some cut-leaf tobacco, Bremen leaf, as black and high flavored as you want. Up here it is only to the goats that we can offer that kind, and to the folk who come from Bergen; they use strong tobacco there to dry out the wet fog."