“Oh, I am sitting here and picking. I am not doing anything.”
“You had better go home, and not sit here in the dust.”
“It is best that I sit here.”
Then Gösta Berling sits down beside him.
“It is not so easy to be a priest,” he says after a while.
“It is all very well down here where there are people,” answers the clergyman. “It is worse up there.”
Gösta understands what he means. He knows those parishes in Northern Värmland where sometimes there is not even a house for the clergyman, where there are not more than a couple of people in ten miles of country, where the clergyman is the only educated man. The Broby minister had been in such a parish for over twenty years.
“That is where we are sent when we are young,” says Gösta. “It is impossible to hold out with such a life; and so one is ruined forever. There are many who have gone under up there.”
“Yes,” says the Broby clergyman; “a man is destroyed by loneliness.”