“A tailor is as fine a fellow as a black-bread baker!” stammered Bjerregrav nervously. “To bake black bread—why, every farmer’s wife can do that!”
“Fine! I believe you! Hell and blazes! If the tailor makes a cap he has enough cloth left over to make himself a pair of breeches. That’s why tailors are always dressed so fine!” The baker was talking to the empty air.
“Millers and bakers are always rogues, everybody says.” Old Bjerregrav turned to Master Andres, trembling with excitement. But the young master stood there looking gaily from one to the other, his lame leg dangling in the air.
“For the tailor nothing comes amiss—there’s too much room in me!” said the baker, as though something were choking him. “Or, as another proverb says—it’s of no more consequence than a tailor in hell. They are the fellows! We all know the story of the woman who brought a full-grown tailor into the world without even knowing she was with child.”
Jeppe laughed. “Now, that’s enough, really; God knows neither of you will give in to the other.”
“Well, and I’ve no intention of trampling a tailor to death, if it can anyhow be avoided—but one can’t always see them.” Baker Jörgen carefully lifted his great wooden shoes. “But they are not men. Now is there even one tailor in the town who has been overseas? No, and there were no men about while the tailor was being made. A woman stood in a draught at the front door, and there she brought forth the tailor.” The baker could not stop himself when once he began to quiz anybody; now that Sören was married, he had recovered all his good spirits.
Bjerregrav could not beat this. “You can say what you like about tailors,” he succeeded in saying at last. “But people who bake black bread are not respected as handicraftsmen—no more than the washerwoman! Tailoring and shoemaking, they are proper crafts, with craftman’s tests, and all the rest.”
“Yes, shoemaking of course is another thing,” said Jeppe.
“But as many proverbs and sayings are as true of you as of us,” said Bjerregrav, desperately blinking.
“Well, it’s no longer ago than last year that Master Klausen married a cabinet-maker’s daughter. But whom must a tailor marry? His own serving-maid?”