"And have a wife and kids on my back? You are a duffer, Pelle! No
need to trouble about that! But a woman--well, that's only for when
a man's bored. See?" He stretches himself, yawning.

Nilen has become quite a young man, but a little crude in his
manner of expressing himself. He sits there and looks at Pelle
with a curious expression in his eyes. "Cobbler's patch!" he says
contemptuously, and thrusts his tongue into his cheek so as to make
it bulge. Pelle says nothing; he knows he cannot thrash Nilen.

Nilen has lit his pipe and is lying on his back in bed--with his
muddy shoes on--chattering. "What's your journeyman like? Ours is
a conceited ass. The other day I had to fetch him a box on the ears,
he was so saucy. I've learned the Copenhagen trick of doing it;
it soon settles a man. Only you want to keep your head about it."
A deuce of a fellow, this Nilen, he is so grown up! Pelle feels
smaller and smaller.

But suddenly Nilen jumps up in the greatest hurry. Out in the bakery
a sharp voice is calling. "Out of the window--to the devil with you!"
he yelps--"the journeyman!" And Pelle has to get through the window,
and is so slow about it that his boots go whizzing past him. While
he is jumping down he hears the well-known sound of a ringing box
on the ear.

When Pelle returned from his wanderings he was tired and languid;
the stuffy workshop did not seem alluring. He was dispirited, too;
for the watchmaker's clock told him that he had been three hours
away. He could not believe it.