Read Ebook: What happened to Inger Johanne as told by herself by Zwilgmeyer Dikken Young Florence Liley Illustrator Poulsson Emilie Translator

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Ebook has 1119 lines and 49672 words, and 23 pages

Tuo leve?leukainen mies, jonka ?lykk?iss? silmiss? luetut lauseet ik??nkuin el?vin? kuvastuivat, oli Pietari, S?rkilahden vanhaa vapaasukua. H?n oli Turun pormestarin, Kiukku-Nikun poika, jonka h?nen mahtava sukulaisensa, is?ns? orpana, piispa Maunu S?rkilahti oli ohjannut papilliselle uralle ja joka jo varhemmin oli ollut Turun tuomiokirkossa kuoripapin virassa. Mutta nyt oli h?n kauan ollut ulkomailla, kauemmin kuin nuo toiset; oli Rostockissa p??ssyt maisteriksi, vaan sitten viipynyt monta vuotta Wittenbergiss?, aste asteelta seuraten, miten h?nen oppi-is?ns?, Martti Luther, k?vi ta But on that day it was fortunate that we had taken his boat, and not some miserable little thing belonging to anybody else.

As soon as Lisa got her breath, she cried out: "Oh! the chips! the chips!" But just then George's head appeared, and Mina and I made a grab for him; but he was so stupidly heavy that we couldn't pull him in; so we only held him fast and screamed and screamed. Out from the wharves and from the islands came ever so many boats and lots of people. Those minutes that we hung over the edge of that boat and held on with all our might to the half-drowned George, who was as heavy as lead--shall I ever forget? George was drawn up into another boat and they took us in tow. Lisa sat like a drowned rat and cried till she choked. Then Massa began to cry, too;--and so we came to the wharf.

For several days after the rescue I couldn't go into the street without people's stopping me and wanting a full account of how it all happened. Really, it is quite troublesome to be famous; but I like it pretty well, nevertheless.

OUR HOME

We live up on a hill in a lovely old house. People call it an old rattletrap of a house, but that is nothing but envy because they don't live there themselves. There are big old elm-trees around the house which shade it and make the back part of the deep rooms quite dark. The rafters show overhead, and the floors rock up and down when you walk hard on them, just because they are so old. There is one place in the parlor floor where it rocks especially. When no one is in there except Karsten and myself, we often tramp with all our might where the floor rocks most, for we want dreadfully to see whether we can't break through into the cellar.

There are several gardens belonging to our house. One big garden has only plum-trees with slender trunks and a little cluster of branches and leaves high, high up. When I walk down there under the plum-trees, I often imagine that I am down in the tropics, wandering under palm-trees. I have a garden of my own, too. I wouldn't have mentioned it particularly if there weren't one remarkable fact about it. Really and truly, nothing will grow in it but that dark blue toad-flax--you know what that is. Every single spring I buy seeds with my pocket money, and plant and water and take care of them, but when summer comes there is nothing in the garden but great big toad-flax stalks all gone to seed. It is awfully tiresome, especially when they have such a horrid name.

PLAYMATES

Now I think it is time to describe all of us boys and girls who play together, and whom I am going to tell about in my book.

There is Peter, the dean's son, with his sleepy brown eyes and freckles as big as barleycorns. Peter is a cowardly chap. He never has any opinion of his own. And if he had one he would never dare to stand by it if you contradicted him. He's terribly afraid of the cold, too, and goes about with a scarf wound around his neck, and mittens if a single snowflake falls. Still, Peter is very nice indeed; he does everything that I want him to.

Then there is my brother Karsten, but I've told you about him. He is a little younger than the rest of us.

Another boy is Ezekiel Weiby. He is fourteen years old and has an awfully narrow face--not much broader than a ruler. He is very clever and reads every sort of book. But when he is out with the rest of us, he wants us all to sit still and hear him tell about everything he has been reading. For a while that is very pleasant, but I get tired of it pretty soon, for I hate to sit still long at a time. That is a very funny thing. Other people get tired of walking or running about, but I can't stand it to sit still.

Nils Trap is the bravest of all the boys. He never wears an overcoat, but goes around with his hands in his pockets whistling a funny tune:

"Ho, hei for Laaringa!"

Massa Peckell is plump and easy-going. She thinks the most beautiful thing is to be pale and thin. She heard that it would give you a delicate pale skin if you drank vinegar and ate rice soup, so she tried it as hard as she could. But her beauty-cure only gave her the stomach-ache. Her fat, red cheeks are just like Baldwin apples still.

Every day, summer and winter, we are together, all of us that I have written about here. In summer there is a lot of fun to be had everywhere, but especially on the delightful hill back of our house--,--but in winter, humph! What can girls and boys do in such horrid mild winters as we are now having, I should really like to know! Last year we had no snow to speak of, and here it is now after New Year's and I haven't yet, to my recollection, seen a single snowflake which didn't melt in five minutes, or any ice that didn't break through as soon as you stamped your heel on it. If I could only make a journey to the North Pole and do what I wanted to there, I should send down some lovely soft snow-drifts and some smooth blue glistening ice in a jiffy, to all the boys and girls who are wishing for them day after day.

In the meantime I am glad that I have begun to write this book in winter, otherwise I should be bored to death.

Of course we go out-of-doors now too, even though the mild weather is disgusting; but when it storms as hard as it did in the autumn, making the old elm-trees crash and swish so that we can scarcely hear ourselves talk, then it is not comfortable to play out-of-doors, I assure you. At such times we often shut ourselves up in the little room over the wood-shed. There is nothing up there but a keg of red ochre which we paint ourselves with, but really we have lots of fun there, nevertheless.

Ezekiel always seizes the chance to give a lecture in the wood-shed, and his words gush out like water from a fountain. When I get tired of it, I sneak around behind him and give him a little English punch in the back, for I am very clever at boxing, you must know. "Come on! Can you use your fists like an Englishman?" And then I roll my hands round very fast, just as I have seen the English sailors do, and give him a quick punch in the stomach with my fist.

Ezekiel squirms about like a worm, and defends himself with his small weak fingers. The others laugh, and Ezekiel and I laugh with them, and so we all laugh together.

Well, now you know us all, and you know what it is like around here.

AN INTERRUPTED CELEBRATION

My, how well I remember the day that we almost killed the dean's wife! That sounds queer; but it really was a live dean's wife that we really came within a hair's breadth of killing. And that, while we were just playing and celebrating the Seventeenth of May--the day when Norway adopted her own constitution, you know.

Now you shall hear how it happened.

Right behind our old house we have a whole big breezy hill. If any of you live down on the coast, you will know how beautiful it is and what fun one can have up on such a hill. If you have only seen it as you went by on the steamer, you would never imagine how lovely it is up on bare gray hills that look out towards the sea. Little soil, but lots of sunshine; wherever there is a tiny crevice, fine long blades of grass, buttercups, and yellow broom will immediately start up. Wild rose bushes and juniper cling to the hillside here and there, and then the heather away up on the top;--all over the whole flat top nothing but purple heather. Above is the clear blue sky; and out there the sea in a great wide circle--nothing to shut off the view; oh, it is glorious!

This has really nothing to do with the dean's wife, but I only wanted to explain what it was like up there on the hill. For it was up there that Nils Trap, Ezekiel, Peter, Karsten, Mina, Massa, and I played, many a pleasant day.

Right at our yard the hill begins to be steeper; first comes a little walled-in garden, then terraces and cliffs, big rocks and little rocks, then down a steep precipice, and then up a few steps again where you have to use hands and feet both, and grab hold of the heather and juniper if you want to go farther up.

About half-way up the hill there is a great big rock jutting out, which you can only climb on one side, and that with the greatest difficulty. This is our fort. Here we have both batteries and bastions, a room for bullets and cannon-balls, a room for powder, and a dungeon. From up there we have the most splendid view down over the town with its low gaily painted wooden houses, and the small leafy linden-trees that creep up through the streets. From our fort people down there look just like darning-needles; from the very top of the hill they look like a swarming mass of little pins.

I remember distinctly that particular Seventeenth of May; the spring had come so early that we already had fine young birch leaves and clear mild air. For several days we had been talking about a feast that we wanted to have in the dungeon, for there we should be wholly out of sight. There was to be a salute, speeches and songs. Peter and Karsten were always the gunners. With much trouble we had carried big stones up to the fort; these we threw with all our might down again over the precipice. This was our way of giving a salute; it made no little racket, you may be sure! The boys were to provide something to drink, and we the cake and glasses. We were never allowed to take any glasses up on the hill, except old goblets with the feet broken off. I thought then it was terribly stingy of Mother not to let us have proper glasses.

Ezekiel made the speech in honor of the day. I can still see his thin white fingers round the broken glass while he spouted and speechified about "our young freedom crowns this day of liberty with flowers." I had lately read the whole speech in an old children's paper, and of course had to confide this fact to Mina; the others wanted to know what we were laughing about, and at last all the listeners were laughing and whispering to each other; but Ezekiel stuck to it. After the speech four stones were thrown down. Karsten was beaming. "Oh, oh, what a crash!" he kept saying.

After that Ezekiel made a speech in honor of Sweden; at the end of the speech he suggested that we should sing:

"See yonder by the Baltic's salt waves,"

but as none of us knew the tune, and Ezekiel himself hadn't a speck of music in him, the song wouldn't go. For it didn't help us at all for him to insist that he heard the tune plainly in his head. Then Nils Trap made a speech in honor of the ladies; I remember how I admired the few telling words: "A cheer and four shots for the ladies!" Not a bit more! I thought that sounded so awfully manlike.

Peter rushed off to the top of the fort to fire off the shots, Karsten after him, his hair standing on end. The stones went crashing over--the next moment we heard a doleful shriek from below. Peter came rushing down to the dungeon, ashy-gray under his freckles, crying:

We all dashed up instantly. Down below the fort, just at the foot of the precipice, stood the dean's little crooked wife, with a purple kerchief over her head and one slender hand held up in the air. The stone, which had been fired off in honor of the ladies, lay less than two feet from her!

Even to this day I am sorry that I didn't run to her at once and go back with her down the hill. That didn't occur to any of us, I think. When we found that she hadn't been hit, but was only terribly frightened at seeing the great stone in the air right over her, we almost thought, up there in the fort, that it was rather unseemly of the dean's wife to scream out so.

She crept down the hill alone; she had just gone up to see to a white bed-spread that was hanging on a bush to dry.

Our festive mood was gone, however,--shocked out of us, as it were.

But very soon the horror of it came over me; just think, if Peter had killed his own mother! I remember clearly that I wouldn't have anything more either to eat or drink, and Nils Trap teased me, and said I had grown quite white around the nose with fright.

As we sat there looking at each other and not able to get started on anything again, suddenly we heard a voice:

"Peter."

"That's Father," said Peter, and crouched away down so that he couldn't possibly be seen from below.

"Hush--sh--keep still--hush!" We lay in a heap, frightened and silent.

"Peter," came again from below. "Come down this instant. I know you are up there."

"Hush--just keep still, not a sound."

Dead silence.

There stood the dean with no hat, just in his wig, and furiously angry. It was no fun to be Peter now. He was everlastingly slow about clambering down. The dean scolded up towards our six heads, sticking out of the dungeon:

"Yes, just try such a thing again--just try it--your backs shall suffer for it--big boys and girls as you are--killing people with stones!"

"Yes, but we didn't kill anybody," called Karsten.

I was perfectly appalled at Karsten's daring to call out such a thing to the dean, who, however, paid not the least attention; Peter had at last come within his reach, so he had something else to do.

First a box on one ear: "I'll teach you,"--then a box on the other ear: "almost killing your own mother"--and he kept on hitting. But only think; although I felt so terribly sorry for Peter, so sorry that I believe I should have been glad to take the blows in his place--I was as much to blame as he--yet there was something so fearfully exciting in watching Peter and the dean down there, that I almost felt disappointed when the dean took Peter by his left ear and dragged him away. The boys had lately made a little path down the hill and to the back gate of the dean's garden. It was lucky for Peter that there was some sort of a beaten track, now that he was being led along it by the ear.

"You can depend upon it that Peter will get a thrashing," said Karsten, who also felt the excitement of the moment. "But if it were I"--he grew very earnest--"I'd throw myself on my back and stretch my legs up in the air and kick so that nobody could come near me. He shouldn't beat me, no indeed, he'd soon find that out."

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