When Lauritz reached home his mother was sitting at the piano playing and singing. The smell of freshly baked cake filled the room. On the table stood a glass bowl of apples. Lauritz’s father sat on a chair smoking his pipe. Without knowing just what he said or why he said it, Lauritz went up to the piano and whispered in his mother’s ear: “When I am a big man I shall be a prison warden.”
“What did you say?” she cried. “A prison warden, Lauritz? In there with those people? Never!”
Lauritz repeated: “When I am a big man I shall be a prison warden.”
And then something happened that was never explained. Who had the idea first no one knew. Perhaps it entered all those little heads at the same time, in that hour when they were standing, each a prisoner under his own tree, each in his own cell—just in a single hour.
When Teacher Jensen was told about the plan, he only nodded as if he had known about it long ago. But when they begged him to talk to the prison inspector, since their scheme was contrary to all regulations, he shook his head, saying: “It is your idea. You must carry it out. It is up to you, if you believe in yourselves, to stand fast by your beliefs.”
That was two months before Christmas, and all the school-children, big and little, boys and girls, were there. Money was the first necessity, and it had to be collected in modest amounts and earned in an honorable way. Teacher Jensen said that if the gift was not honest no good came of it. The children all saved the money that they would ordinarily have spent on sweets and on stamps for their albums. They went on little errands, chopped wood, carried water, and scrubbed milk cans, wooden buckets, and copper tubs. The money was put into a big earthenware pig that Teacher Jensen had put in the wardrobe at school. No one knew who gave the most or who gave the least.
Lauritz announced that, including the seventeen sick people, there were three hundred and ten prisoners in the jail.
In the middle of December the pig was broken and the money was counted over and over, but it did not amount to much. Then a little fellow came with his little private savings bank, and a girl with a little earthen receptacle in which she kept her spare pennies. That started them off. Many little hoardings destined for Christmas presents were emptied into the great common fund at school. See how it grew! Shiny paper was now brought, and flags and walnuts. Every day the whole school stayed until supper time cutting out and pasting. The little girls made white and red roses. They wove baskets, gilded walnuts, pasted flags on little sticks, and cut out cardboard stars, painting them gold and silver. The little ones made, out of clay, birds’ nests with eggs in them, and little horses and cows that they covered with bright colors so they looked like real live animals. The boys cut out photographs and made little boxes. With jig saws they fashioned napkin rings and paper weights.
Christmas trees were bought—three hundred and ten real fir trees, for which the gardener charged only twenty-five pfennigs apiece.