the father. "But you will not go into any house where you have no
business, just to look at strangers. I know you are capable of doing
such things. You can start soon after dinner."

Sally was very happy. She quickly fetched her straw hat and took leave.
But outside she did not run straight through the passage-way as she
usually did in similar cases, but went to the kitchen door and peeped
in, and when she saw 'Lizebeth at the sink, where the latter was
scraping her pans, she went in very close to the old woman and said
somewhat mysteriously: "'Lizebeth, does Edi or Ritz perhaps have a torn
mattress on their bed?"

'Lizebeth stopped scraping and turned round. She looked at Sally from
head to foot, put her hands on her hips and said very slowly and
importantly: "May I ask what you mean by that question, Sally? Do you
think this household is so carried on that one lies about on ragged
mattresses and sleeps, until a little one, who is far from old enough to
turn a mattress, thinks of coming to ask 'does not this one or that one
have a ragged mattress' on his bed? Yes, Sally, what cobwebs you do have
in your head."

"I do not care about the mattress, it is on account of Marianne that I
ask," Sally explained. "Do you know, she now has some new people in her
house and I should so much like to see them, and therefore I wanted so
much to know whether you could not sacrifice a mattress so that Marianne
could pull the horsehair for a mattress, for Mother will not let me go
into the house without a good excuse."

"Oh, so! that is different," said 'Lizebeth quite mildly, for she had
also been wondering what kind of people her old friend had taken into