The lake was entirely frozen; one could walk across it from shore to shore. When there was a moon, the rag and bone man would go down and with his wooden shoe break the ice round the seagulls and wild ducks, which were frozen in the lake, and then carry them home under his snow-covered cape. He would put them on the peat beside the fireplace, where for days they stood on one leg gazing sickly into the embers, until Sörine at last took them into the kitchen and wrung their necks.
In spite of there being a fire day and night, the cold was felt intensely in the Crow's Nest; it was impossible to heat the room. Sörine, with the bread-knife, stuffed old rags into the cracks in the wall; but one day when doing this, a big piece of the wall collapsed. She filled up the hole with the eiderdown, and when Lars Peter came home at night, he patched it up and nailed planks across to keep it in place. The roof was not up too much either; the rats and house-martens had worked havoc in it, so that it was like a sieve, and the snow drifted into the loft. It was all bad.
Every day Sörine tried to rouse Lars Peter to do something.
But what could he do? "I can't work harder than I do, and steal I won't," said he.
"What do the others do, who live in a pretty and comfortable house?"
Yes, how did other people manage? Lars Peter could not imagine. He had never envied any one, nor drawn comparisons, so had never faced the question before.
"You toil and toil, but never get any further, that I can see," Sörine continued.
"Do you really mean that?" Lars Peter looked at her with surprise and sorrow.
"Yes, I do. What have you done? Aren't we just where we started?"
Lars Peter bent his head on hearing her hard words. But it was all quite true; except for strict necessities, they had never money to spare.