The young wife wiped the dirt off the soldier, first with a green leaf, and then with her fine handkerchief--it had such a delightful smell, that it was to the pewter soldier just as if he had awaked from a trance. "Let me see him," said the young man. He laughed, and then shook his head. "Nay, it cannot be he; but he reminds me of a story about a pewter soldier which I had when I was a little boy!" And then he told his wife about the old house, and the old man, and about the pewter soldier that he sent over to him because he was so very, very lonely; and he told it as correctly as it had really been, so that the tears came into the eyes of his young wife, on account of the old house and the old man. "It may possibly be, however, that it is the same pewter soldier!" said she, "I will take care of it, and remember all that you have told me; but you must show me the old man's grave!" "But I do not know it," said he, "and no one knows it! all his friends were dead, no one took care of it, and I was then a little boy!" "How very, very lonely he must have been!" said she. "Very, very lonely!" said the pewter soldier; "but it is delightful not to be forgotten!" "Delightful!" shouted something close by; but no one, except the pewter soldier, saw that it was a piece of the hog's-leather hangings; it had lost all its gilding, it looked like a piece of wet clay, but it had an opinion, and it gave it: "The gilding decays, But hog's leather stays!" This the pewter soldier did not believe. ------------ THE DROP OF WATER. What a magnifying glass is, you surely know--such a round sort of spectacle-glass that makes everything full a hundred times larger than it really is. When one holds it before the eye, and looks at a drop of water out of the pond, then one sees above a thousand strange creatures. It looks almost like a whole plateful of shrimps springing about among each other, and they are so ravenous, they tear one another's arms and legs, tails and sides, and yet they are glad and pleased in their way. Now, there was once an old man, who was called by every body Creep-and-Crawl; for that was his name. He would always make the best out of everything, and when he could not make anything out of it he resorted to witchcraft. Now, one day he sat and held his magnifying glass before his eye, and looked at a drop of water that was taken out of a little pool in the ditch. What a creeping and crawling was there! all the thousands of small creatures hopped and jumped about, pulled one another, and pecked one another.