And in the stable before full mangers the pensioners’ horses sleep and dream of the journeys of their youth. It is sweet to dream when they know that they never again shall leave the filled cribs, the warm stalls of Ekeby. In a musty old carriage-house, where all the broken-down coaches and worn-out sledges were stored, was a wonderful collection of old vehicles. Many are the pensioners who have lived and died at Ekeby. Their names are forgotten on the earth, and they have no longer a place in men’s hearts; but the major’s wife has kept the vehicles in which they came to Ekeby, she has collected them all in the old carriage-house. And there they stand and sleep, and dust falls thick, thick over them. But now in this February night the major’s wife has the door opened to the carriage-house, and with lanterns and torches she seeks out the vehicles which belong to Ekeby’s present pensioners,—Beerencreutz’s old gig, and Örneclou’s coach, painted with coat of arms, and the narrow cutter which had brought Cousin Christopher. She does not care if the vehicles are for summer or winter, she only sees that each one gets his own. And in the stable they are now awake, all the pensioners’ old horses, who had so lately been dreaming before full mangers. The dream shall be true. You shall again try the steep hills, and the musty hay in the sheds of wayside inns, and drunken horse-dealers’ sharp whips, and the mad races on ice so slippery that you tremble only to walk on it. The old beasts mouth and snort when the bit is put into their toothless jaws; the old vehicles creak and crack. Pitiful infirmity, which should have been allowed to sleep in peace till the end of the world, was now dragged out before all eyes; stiff joints, halting forelegs, spavin, and broken-wind are shown up. The stable grooms succeed, however, in getting the horses harnessed; then they go and ask the major’s wife in what Gösta Berling shall be put, for, as every one knows, he came to Ekeby in the coal-sledge of the major’s wife. “Put Don Juan in our best sledge,” she says, “and spread over it the bear-skin with the silver claws!” And when the grooms grumble, she continues: “There is not a horse in my stable which I would not give to be rid of that man, remember that!” Well, now the vehicles are waked and the horses too, but the pensioners still sleep. It is now their time to be brought out in the winter night; but it is a more perilous deed to seize them in their beds than to lead out stiff-legged horses and shaky old carriages. They are bold, strong men, tried in a hundred adventures; they are ready to defend themselves till death; it is no easy thing to take them against their will from out their beds and down to the carriages which shall carry them away. The major’s wife has them set fire to a hay-stack, which stands so near the house that the flames must shine in to where the pensioners are sleeping. “The hay-stack is mine, all Ekeby is mine,” she says.