"I will not listen! I know the whole story as though I had been present from the beginning. Poor famished creatures, who all looked as though they had already for four weeks played the ghost. Surely! It is a sin and shame, and may the evil one pay back the greedy sharpers and Hollanders, and pour melted gold down their hungry throats! But when a gun is fired off it is well not to be in front of it. Why did you stand near and gaze when you knew that you had such a butter-heart in your breast? Now you have the burden. What will be the result? You will naturally marry the girl. And then? Then there comes every year a crying brat until there are four or five. At the fifth the poor creature dies and Aunt Ursul can then take the young brood and raise them. But I tell you, that won't do, by any means! I would not undertake it should you offer me a ton of gold for each child." Aunt Ursul had spoken so excitedly and in so loud a voice that Lambert was glad when, turning, he saw Catherine following slowly at a great distance, her head bowed down and she often plucking a wood-flower. "How can you talk in that way, aunt?" said Lambert. "To you it would indeed be pleasanter should I utter what first comes into the mouth, and say yea, and amen, to what you dumbheads have hatched out. Furthermore, I have no sympathy for you, sir. You have prepared your own soup. You must eat it yourself. Poor girl! Thrust out into the world naked and bare, so to speak, and with such eyes--just like your sainted mother's--by which all men were captivated. This is itself already a heaven-appearing misfortune. I can sing a song about it. Why do you laugh, you green woodpecker? Do you think, since now, in my fifty-seventh year, I am not as slim as an osier-switch and as smooth as an eel, I could not turn the heads of the men at seventeen? You are getting on beautifully. I tell you how foolish they were, though it isn't worth while to say it, for they are all so. But I had half a dozen on every finger, and your girl has as yet but two." "Surely I do not understand you, aunt," said Lambert, whose anxiety kept increasing as long as she kept talking in her peculiar way. "Well, then, I will speak plainly," said Ursul, after she had cast a rapid glance toward Catherine. "This morning--I was just raking up my hay--your brother came with such a leap over the gate that my first impulse was to give him one over the head, and, distracted and wild, to my horror, began to speak so incoherently, that no one besides me, who know him from childhood, could have gathered his meaning; saying that he must shoot himself dead since you could not both marry her, and other foolish talk, all showing that he is madly and blindly in love with the girl."