Toward the end of the second week the whole household was in open rebellion. The housekeeper raged about the inroads on the butter, and the servants declared they could not go on working at a place where they fed you on nothing but slom. It had reached a pass where the Lieutenant dared not show his face in the kitchen; for there the murmurs were loudest. Nor were things as they should be in the dining room. Joy had fled the board. The governess left her plate untouched and the little daughters of the house, who otherwise stuck by their father through thick and thin, even they began to pipe a few feeble protests. Then at last Fru Lagerlöf came to the rescue. She conferred with Mamselle Lovisa and the housekeeper, and they all thought it time now to resort to the old tried and sure remedy. At dinner there was boiled slom. Now, the very look of boiled slom is enough! There is a pallor about it peculiarly corpselike, and, besides, it is quite tasteless. Just the sight of it takes away one’s appetite. When the Lieutenant saw the boiled slom he looked as glum as the others. “We are all out of butter,” Mamselle Lovisa gave as excuse; “and since you will have slom at every meal we had no choice but to serve it boiled. For my part,” she added, “I think it tastes no worse that way than any other.” The Lieutenant made no answer; so they all knew that Mamselle Lovisa had triumphed. He might easily have stepped into the pantry and seen for himself whether the butter was all gone, or ordered a fresh supply; but he did neither. After that dinner he bought no more slom. What was the use, he said, when the womenfolk were too lazy to prepare the fish in the proper way? No one contradicted him, though all knew he was as glad as they were to see the last of the slom. IX THE SEVENTEENTH OF AUGUST I IT IS not easy to say how the seventeenth of August, which was Lieutenant Lagerlöf’s birthday, came to be the great day that it was. But one can imagine that with so many gifted persons all living in a little place like East Ämtervik, it was really necessary that they should have a chance, at least once a year, to show what they could do. When, for example, there were three such fine orators as Engineer Noreen of Herrestad, Senator Nils Andersson of Bävik, and Merchant Teodor Nilsson of Visteberg, the first of whom went in for the pathetic, the second for the profound, and the third for the poetic, it would have been a great pity had they never been heard elsewhere than at small parties and town meetings. And with a verse writer, too, like Sexton Melanoz at one’s command! Days on end he had to sit in the schoolroom and hear the youngsters spell, stammer, and stumble through the intricate mazes of the Swedish language. Surely he needed to let this maltreated tongue ring out in high-sounding eulogistic measures once a year at least!