He had let his hair and his goat-like beard grow, so that he looked like a common peasant, but sometimes he pulled his mouth toward his ears and talked harshly in the broadest Scanian, and sometimes he squeezed up his eyes and lamented in the most sentimental Smålandish. He kept awake all night continuing his merry discourse. Once he took a piece of charcoal and drew a speaking likeness of Johannes on the wall. A little later he gave Kerstin Bure shrewd advice as to how she should grease the mill-axle. Or he would sing psalms and polka-tunes, to which he himself set the words. In the morning he took from his traveling-sack a suit with bright soldier’s buttons. When Johannes and the old woman peeped wonderingly through the shutters to see whither he went, he was already standing in the church square, and there was such a clatter and hubbub among the populace that it echoed for miles. “That’s Mons Bock!” clamored the crowd. “That is our valiant General Stenbock. If we have him with us, we’ll go out and fight for our country, every one of us, father and son, so God help us!” “Johannes,” said Kerstin Bure then to her sixteen-year foster-son, with a hardness in her voice that he had never heard before, “you are meant to keep devoutly to your books and some day wear a pastor’s surplice as my sainted father did, but not to lose your blood in worldly feuds. Stick your tinder-box and clasp-knife in your jacket and tie your leather coat at your belt! Go then out into the woods and keep yourself well hid there until we have peace in the land! Before that I do not wish to see you again. Remember that! You hear now how the men shout on the church square, but mayhap their mouths will soon be stopped with black earth.” He did as she bade him and wandered off into the woods by unknown paths. The firs became gradually more bristling and dense, so that for a long distance he had to push through backwards with the leather coat over his face. In the evening he came to a wide fen, and far out at the rim of a black lake lay an island overgrown with alders. “There I’ll build my den,” he thought. But the quagmire of the swampy fen which floated over the twofold bottom, and the dark water where not a glimmer of daylight broke through, sank beneath his feet, until, exhausted and half-asleep, he sat down on a ledge. A rustling still sounded from the ridges of the wood, but the lake lay quiet, and the little yellow reflections of the fluffy clouds soon stood motionless. In the infinite distance beyond the mist of the fen a goat-bell from time to time struck a few short, unresonant strokes. Two herd-girls blew quaveringly on their cow-horns, and on the forgotten and dilapidated sepulchre-mound in the dip of the valley the glow-worms kindled their lanterns in the grass.