Afterwards he went out in the barn, and there he lay down and wept. Margit kept at home with the little boy. She heard about Nils, how he went from dance to dance, and she looked at the child and wept,--looked at him again and was happy. The first thing she taught him was to say papa; but this she dared not do when the mother, or the grandmother, as she was henceforth called, chanced to be near. The result of this was that it was the grandmother whom the boy called papa. It cost Margit much to break him of this, and thus she fostered in him an early shrewdness. He was not very large before he knew that Nils the tailor was his father, and when he reached the age in which the romantic acquires a flavor, he became also aware what sort of a man tailor Nils was. The grandmother had strictly forbidden even the mention of his name; what she mainly strove for was to have the houseman's place, Kampen, become an independent gard, so that her daughter and her boy might be free from care. She availed herself of the gard-owner's poverty, effected the purchase of the place, paid off a portion of the money each year, and managed the business like a man, for she had been a widow for fourteen years. Kampen was a large place, and had been extended until now it fed four cows, sixteen sheep, and a horse in which she was half owner. Nils the tailor meanwhile took to roving about the parish; his business had fallen off, partly because he felt less interest in it, partly also because he was not liked as before. He gave, therefore, more time to fiddling; this led oftener to drinking and thence to fighting and evil days. There were those who had heard him say he was unhappy. Arne might have been about six years old, when one winter day he was frolicking in the bed, whose coverlet he had up for a sail, while he was steering with a ladle. The grandmother sat spinning in the room, absorbed in her own thoughts, and nodded occasionally as though she would make a fixed fact of something she was thinking about. The boy knew that he was unheeded, and he fell to singing, just as he had learned it, the rough, wild song about tailor Nils:-- "Unless 'twas only yesterday hither first you came, You've surely heard already of Nils the tailor's fame. "Unless 'twas but this morning you came among us first, You've heard how he knocked over tall Johan Knutson Kirst. "How, in his famous barn-fight with Ola Stor-Johann, He said, 'Bring down your porridge when we two fight again.' "That fighting fellow, Bugge, a famous man was he: His name was known all over fjord and fell and sea. "'Now, choose the place, you tailor, where I shall knock you down, And then I'll spit upon it, and there I'll lay your crown.' "'Ah, only come so near, I may catch your scent, my man, Your bragging hurts nobody; don't dream it ever can.'