The new boniface must have found it rather tiring trying to satisfy the demands of his customers for home-brewed ginger beer, wild raspberries, green apples, and polypody. Of a sudden it struck him that he had a couple of sisters; and immediately he went over to the farm, where he found the girls down by the pond sailing the boys’ boats and promising each other never again to play with the boys or even so much as look at them. “You may come up to the colony, girls, and be waitresses at my tavern.” Anna and Selma let the boats sail whither they would. Not a word did they say about being forgotten and left to shift for themselves all this long time. They went right along with their brother to the boys’ colony, blissfully happy. VI THE OLD SOLDIER IT WAS late afternoon of a beautiful day in autumn. Back-Kaisa, the onetime nursemaid at Mårbacka, who now worked at the loom, was tramping through the woods on her way to the hill-croft where she was born and grew up--on an errand for Lieutenant Lagerlöf. She and little Selma were still great friends, and she had taken the child along. They were in no hurry, these two; they stopped to pick and eat whortleberries growing by the roadside, they admired the gorgeous flybane and gathered their aprons full of lovely mosses to take home with them so as to have something pretty to lay between the inner and storm-windows of the nursery. Back-Kaisa was happy to be once more in the woods, where she knew every shrub and every stone. When they came to the wattled fence which surrounded the clearing where the croft-hut stood and were about to step over the stile, Back-Kaisa said: “Mind, Selma, you mustn’t say a word about war in Father’s hearing!” The little girl was astonished at that. She knew that Back-Kaisa’s father was an old soldier who had fought with Napoleon at Leipsic. That one could not speak with him about war seemed unbelievable. “Why can’t I talk to him about war?” she queried. “That one must never do with them that’s been out in a real war,” Back-Kaisa told her. Now the little girl was more astonished than ever. She thought of _Fritiof;_ of _Hjalmar;_ of _Hector_, and all the gods and heroes of antiquity she had read about in her saga-books--and her head was in a whirl. In the cabin on the edge of the hearth, with his back to the fire, sat Back-Kaisa’s father, a tall, gaunt-looking man with a coarse-featured and furrowed face. That he was of the olden time could be seen by his mode of dress, for he wore knee-breeches and shoes instead of boots and had on a shockingly grimy sheepskin coat. But on the whole his appearance was not more bizarre than that of other old peasants. The little girl stared and stared at the soldier who would not allow any one to speak of war in his hearing. To her there was nothing so delightful as to hear tales of battles or read stories of wars. She thought it a great pity that she could not ask him to tell her about the things he had been through.