Nikolai has gone back to his workshop in the town, but I have remained behind. It matters little where I am, for the winter makes a dead man of me in any case.
To pass the time, I carefully measure the piece of land that Nikolai is going to break up when he can afford it, and I calculate what it will cost him, with drainage and everything: a bare two hundred kroner. Then he could keep a horse. It would have been an act of charity to give him this money in case his mother could not. He could have added another field to his land then.
"Look here, Petra--why don't you give Nikolai the two hundred
kroner he needs for fodder for a horse?"
"And four hundred to buy the horse," she muttered.
"That makes six."
"I haven't got such a lot of six hundred kroners lying about."
"But wouldn't the horse be useful for plowing?"
A pause. Then:
"He can break the ground himself."