Wooden-leg Larsen had been through the whole kingdom with his barrel-organ, and had to tell them all about it; of the railway- trains which travelled so fast that the landscape turned round on its own axis, and of the great shops and places of amusement in the capital.
“It must be as it will,” said Master Andres. “But in the summer I shall go to the capital and work there!”
“In Jutland—that’s where they have so many wrecks!” said the baker. “They say everything is sand there! I’ve heard that the country is shifting under their feet—moving away toward the east. Is it true that they have a post there that a man must scratch himself against before he can sit down?”
“My sister has a son who has married a Jutland woman and settled down there,” said Bjerregrav. “Have you seen anything of them?”
The baker laughed. “Tailors are so big—they’ve got the whole world in their waistcoat pocket. Well, and Funen? Have you been there, too? That’s where the women have such a pleasant disposition. I’ve lain before Svendborg and taken in water, but there was no time to go ashore.” This remark sounded like a sigh.
“Can you stand it, wandering so much?” asked Bjerregrav anxiously.
Wooden-leg Larsen looked contemptuously at Bjerregrav’s congenital club-foot—he had received his own injury at Heligoland, at the hands of an honorable bullet. “If one’s sound of limb,” he said, spitting on the floor by the window.
Then the others had to relate what had happened in town during the course of the summer; of the Finnish barque which had stranded in the north, and how the “Great Power” had broken out again. “Now he’s sitting in the dumps under lock and key.”
Bjerregrav took exception to the name they gave him; he called it blasphemy, on the ground that the Bible said that power and might belonged to God alone.
Wooden-leg Larsen said that the word, as they had used it, had nothing to do with God; it was an earthly thing; across the water people used it to drive machinery, instead of horses.