there was a little girl, too, named Louise, who was with some folks
away up in the inland parishes. She was in high spirits, and told risky
stories and sang songs by no means sacred. The old people shook their
heads over her--the younger ones watched her with sidelong glances. And
when she left, she kissed Peer, and turned round more than once to look
back at him, flushed under her big hat, and smiling; and it seemed to
Peer that she must surely be the loveliest creature in all the world.

But now--now she had gone to a place where the ungodly dwell in
such frightful torment, and no hope of salvation for her through all
eternity--and Peer all the while could only think of her in a light
dress and a big straw hat, all song and happy laughter.

Then came the question: Who was to pay for the boy now? True, his
baptismal certificate said that he had a father--his name was Holm,
and he lived in Christiania--but, from what the mother had said, it was
understood that he had disappeared long ago. What was to be done with
the boy?

Never till now had Peer rightly understood that he was a stranger here,
for all that he called the old couple father and mother.

He lay awake night after night up in the loft, listening to the talk
about him going on in the room below--the good-wife crying and saying:
"No, no!", the others saying how hard the times were, and that Peer
was quite old enough now to be put to service as a goat-herd on some
up-country farm.

Then Peer would draw the skin-rug up over his head. But often, when one
of the elders chanced to be awake at night, he could hear some one in