"Then you've been getting on well in foreign parts!" said Lasse,
delighted. "And do they think well of you?"

"Yes!" This came a trifle slowly. In the first place, respect was
just particularly what he had not won--but why trumpet forth his
miseries? "The young master must like me--he often chats with me,
even over the journeyman's head."

"Now, think of that! I have often wondered, I can tell you, how you
were getting on, and whether we shouldn't soon have good news of
you. But everything takes time, that we know. And as you see, I'm
in a very different position."

"Yes, you've become a landowner!" said Pelle, smiling.

"The deuce, yes, so I am!" Lasse laughed, too, but then he groaned
piteously with the pain in his back. "In the daytime, when I'm
working hard, I get along well enough, but as soon as I lie down,
then it comes on directly. And it's the devil of a pain--as though
the wheels of a heavy loaded wagon were going to and fro across your
back, whatever name you like to give it. Well, well! It's a fine
thing, all the same, to be your own master! It's funny how it takes
me--but dry bread tastes better to me at my own table than--yes, by
God, I can tell you, it tastes better than cake at any other body's
table! And then to be all alone on your own bit of land, and to be
able to spit wherever you like to spit, without asking anybody's
leave! And the soil isn't so bad; even if most of it has never been
under cultivation, it has all been lying there storing up its power
to produce since the beginning of the world. But about the people