Twenty times a day the master would go out to the front door, but he always came in again and sat by the window to read, his boot with the wooden heel sticking out behind him. He spat so much that Pelle had to put fresh sand every day under his place.
“Is there some sort of beast that sits in your chest and gnaws?” said Uncle Jörgen, when Andres’ cough troubled him badly. “You look so well otherwise. You’ll recover before we know where we are!”
“Yes, thank God!” The master laughed gaily between two attacks.
“If you only go at the beast hard enough, it’ll surely die. Now, where you are, in your thirtieth year, you ought to be able to get at it. Suppose you were to give it cognac?”
Jörgen Kofod, as a rule, came clumping in with great wooden shoes, and Jeppe used to scold him. “One wouldn’t believe you’ve got a shoemaker for a brother!” he would say crossly; “and yet we all get our black bread from you.”
“But what if I can’t keep my feet warm now in those damned leather shoes? And I’m full through and through of gout—it’s a real misery!” The big baker twisted himself dolefully.
“It must be dreadful with gout like that,” said Bjerregrav. “I myself have never had it.”
“Tailors don’t get gout,” rejoined Baker Jörgen scornfully. “A tailor’s body has no room to harbor it. So much I do know—twelve tailors go to a pound.”
Bjerregrav did not reply.
“The tailors have their own topsy-turvy world,” continued the baker. “I can’t compare myself with them. A crippled tailor—well, even he has got his full strength of body.”