_Daler_--well, 'twas a gift from Heaven, to be kept intact. What else
should he do? His ordinary outgoings were more than covered by the
produce of his fields and stock.

Eleseus, of course, knew better; he had advised his father to put the
money in the Bank. Well, perhaps that was the best, but Isak had put
off doing it for the present--perhaps it would never be done at all.
Not that Isak was above taking advice from his son; Eleseus was no
fool, as he showed later on. Now, in the haymaking season, he had
tried his hand with the scythe--but he was no master hand at that, no.
He kept close to Sivert, and had to get him to use the whetstone every
time. But Eleseus had long arms and could pick up hay in first-rate
fashion. And he and Sivert and Leopoldine, and Jensine the
servant-maid, they were all busy now in the fields with the first lot
of hay that year. Eleseus did not spare himself either, but raked away
till his hands were blistered and had to be wrapped in rags. He had
lost his appetite for a week or so, but worked none the worse for
it now. Something had come over the boy; it looked perhaps as if a
certain unhappy love affair or something of the sort, a touch of
never-to-be-forgotten sorrow and distress, had done him a world of
good. And, look you, he had by now smoked the last of the tobacco
he had brought with him from town; ordinarily, that would have been
enough to make a clerk go about banging doors and expressing himself
emphatically upon many points; but no, Eleseus only grew the steadier
for it firmer and more upright; a man indeed. Even Sivert, the jester,
could not put him out of countenance. Today the pair of them were
lying out on boulders in the river to drink, and Sivert imprudently
offered to get some extra fine moss and dry it for tobacco--"unless
you'd rather smoke it raw?" he said.