the horse's loins with the flat of his hand, and dug his heels into
its sides, while he shouted a song at the top of his voice. He had
been obliged to let go the sack to get up.

"Far away in Smaaland the little imps were dancing
With ready-loaded pistol and rifle-barrelled gun;
All the little devils they played upon the fiddle,
But for the grand piano Old Harry was the one."

In the middle of his noisy joy, he looked up, and immediately burst
into a roar of terror and dropped down on to the wood-shavings. On
the top of the shed at the place where his father had left him stood
a black man and two black, open-mouthed hell-hounds; the man leaned
half out over the ridge of the roof in a menacing attitude. It was
an old figure-head, but Pelle thought it was Old Harry himself, come
to punish him for his bold song, and he set off at a run up the
hill. A little way up he remembered the sack and stopped. He didn't
care about the sack; and he wouldn't get a thrashing if he did leave
it behind, for Father Lasse never beat him. And that horrid devil
would eat him up at the very least, if he ventured down there again;
he could distinctly see how red the nostrils shone, both the devil's
and the dogs'.

But Pelle still hesitated. His father was so careful of that sack,
that he would be sure to be sorry if he lost it--he might even cry
as he did when he lost Mother Bengta. For perhaps the first time,
the boy was being subjected to one of life's serious tests, and
stood--as so many had stood before him--with the choice between
sacrificing himself and sacrificing others. His love for his father,
boyish pride, the sense of duty that is the social dower of the