There was scarce a street in the Old Town where some kindly old face did not look out upon you with patient eyes that spoke of things unseen by the crowd, of friends long waiting in the beyond. In the Cloister[5] there were always one or two old women that were nearing the hundred. The keeper himself was in the nineties. They crept about, the old men with their staffs in the sunshiny garden patches; the women sat at their curtained windows, busy with sewing or knitting. For there were ever small trousers to be patched and small feet to be shod with warm socks for the winter, if not in their own home then in many a one about them. And the Old Town loved them. Some day we heard that they slept, and we bound wreaths for our friends and strewed the street with wintergreen and spruce, and walked, singing, their last journey with them, while all the church bells rang and friends carried the tired body. [Illustration: “THEY CREPT ABOUT, THE OLD MEN WITH THEIR STAFFS.”] “Ashes to ashes--dust to dust.” But there was no pain in the parting, for in the living there had been no discord. The welcome of the grave was peace. CHAPTER IV [Illustration: THE CHRISTMAS SHEAF.] I do not know how the forty years I have been away have dealt with “Jule-nissen,” the Christmas elf of my childhood. He was pretty old then, gray and bent, and there were signs that his time was nearly over. So it may be that they have laid him away. I shall find out when I go over there next time. When I was a boy we never sat down to our Christmas Eve dinner until a bowl of rice and milk had been taken up to the attic, where he lived with the marten and its young, and kept an eye upon the house--saw that everything ran smoothly. I never met him myself, but I know the house-cat must have done so. No doubt they were well acquainted; for when in the morning I went in for the bowl, there it was, quite dry and licked clean, and the cat purring in the corner. So, being there all night, he must have seen and likely talked with him.