"It only lacked that you should turn the key also," growled Ola, while he took off the harness, and, now with the harness and bells over his arm, let the horse walk in before him.
"Why, if young Svarten isn't neighing also! That was the first time you have said a decent good day here in the stable, do you know that? But you will have to wait, you see."
He curried and brushed and rubbed the new arrival like a privileged old gentleman. They had been serving together now just exactly nine years.
In the kitchen the spruce wood crackled and snapped on the hearth, casting an uncertain reddish glow over Ma's newly polished copper and tin dishes and making them look like mystical shields and weapons hung on the walls.
Great-Ola was now sitting there making himself comfortable with his supper, Christmas cheer and entertainment—butter, bread, bacon, wort-cakes, and salt meat; and Torbjörg had been ordered to draw a bowl of small beer for him down in the cellar. Ola had heard one thing and another down there.
Thinka, she had gone out into the kitchen and would take charge of the housekeeping immediately. But there she found some one who meant to hold the reins.
Old Miss Gülcke wouldn't hear of that. She went straight up to the office, they said, and twisted and turned it over with her brother the whole forenoon till she got what she wanted.
And in the evening the sheriff sat on the sofa and talked so sweetly to the young wife. Beret, the chamber-maid, heard him say that he wanted her to have everything so extremely nice and be wholly devoted to him, so that—Horsch, the old graybeard! We can see now what he was doing here last year.
"And thereby," said Ola, with a mouthful between his teeth, while he cut and spread a new slice of bread, "she got rid of the trouble and the management too."