Chapter XI
Everything was white now in the very heart of winter, white from the window-panes in the sitting-room to the garden, the fields, and the mountain slopes, white as the eye glided over the mountain-tops up to the sky, which lay like a semi-transparent, thickly frosted window-pane and shut it all in.
It was cold here, the warm-blooded captain maintained. He began to amuse himself with feeling and tracing out where there was a draught, and then with pasting long strips of paper with cloth and oakum under it. And then he used to go out from his work, with only his wig, without his hat, and chat with the people in the stable or at the barn, where they were threshing.
They were lonely there now with only Ma, Thea, and himself; no one understood what Thinka had been for him!
At last he ended in pondering on laying out fox-traps and traps and spring-guns for wolves and lynx in the hill pastures.
Ma was obliged a hundred times a day to answer what she thought, even if she had just as much idea about it as about pulling down the moon.
"Yes, yes, do it, dear Jäger."
"Yes, but do you believe it will pay—that is what I am asking about—to go to the expense of fox-traps?"
"If you can catch any, then—"
"Yes, if—"