The manager, thinking his hesitancy was due to uncertainty as to where he should write his name, again pointed to the place. "The name must be written there. Now write 'Hoek Matts Ericsson.'" He put the pen to the paper. "This," he mused, "I write for the sake of my faith and my soul's salvation; for the sake of my dear friends the Hellgumists, that I may be allowed to live with them in the unity of the spirit, and so as not to be left alone here when they all go." And he wrote his first name. "And this," he went on thinking, "I write for the sake of my son Gabriel, so I shan't have to lose the dear, good lad who has always been so kind to his old father, and to let him see that after all he is dearer to me than aught else." And then he wrote his middle name. "But this," he thought as he moved the pen for the third time, "why do I write this?" Then, all at once, his hand began to move, as of itself, up and down the page, leaving great black streaks upon the hateful document. "This I do because I'm an old man and must go on tilling the soil--go on plowing and sowing in the place where I have always worked and slaved." Hoek Matts Ericsson looked rather sheepish when he turned to the manager and showed him the paper. "You'll have to excuse me, sir," he said. "It really was my intention to part with my property, but when it came to the scratch, I couldn't do it." THE AUCTION One day in May there was an auction sale at the Ingmar Farm, and what a perfect day it was!--quite as warm as in the summertime. The men had all discarded their long white sheepskin coats and were wearing their short jackets; the women already went about in the loose-sleeved white blouses which belonged with their summer dress. The schoolmaster's wife was getting ready to attend the auction. Gertrude did not care to go, and Storm was too busy with his class work. When Mother Stina was all ready to start, she opened the door to the schoolroom, and nodded a good-bye to her husband. Storm was then telling the children the story of the destruction of the great city of Nineveh, and the look on his face was so stern and threatening that the poor youngsters were almost frightened to death. Mother Stina, on her way to the Ingmar Farm, stopped whenever she came to a hawthorn in bloom, or a hillock decked with white, sweet-scented lilies of the valley. "Where could you find anything lovelier than this," she thought, "even if you were to go as far away as Jerusalem?"