passage.

He had been so sure of himself on the way, and had talked
in loud tones to Pelle about the country where the wages were
so incomprehensibly high, and where in some places you got meat
or cheese to eat with your bread, and always beer, so that the
water-cart in the autumn did not come round for the laborers, but
only for the cattle. And--why, if you liked you could drink gin
like water, it was so cheap; but it was so strong that it knocked
you down at the third pull. They made it from real grain, and not
from diseased potatoes; and they drank it at every meal. And laddie
would never feel cold there, for they wore wool next their skin,
and not this poor linen that the wind blew right through; and a
laborer who kept himself could easily make his two krones a day.
That was something different from their master's miserable eighty
ores and finding themselves in everything.

Pelle had heard the same thing often before--from his father, from
Ole and Anders, from Karna and a hundred others who had been there.
In the winter, when the air was thick with frost and snow and the
needs of the poor, there was nothing else talked about in the little
villages at home; and in the minds of those who had not been on
the island themselves, but had only heard the tales about it, the
ideas produced were as fantastic as the frost-tracery upon the
window-panes. Pelle was perfectly well aware that even the poorest
boys there always wore their best clothes, and ate bread-and-dripping
with sugar on it as often as they liked. There money lay like dirt
by the roadside, and the Bornholmers did not even take the trouble
to stoop and pick it up; but Pelle meant to pick it up, so that
Father Lasse would have to empty the odds and ends out of the sack