654 IB AND CHRISTINE.

is to say, it eats as much as it earns. Jeppe-Jans cultivated his
field in summer. In the winter he made wooden shoes, and then
he had an assistant, a journeyman, who understood as well as he
himself did how to make the wooden shoes strong, and light, and
graceful. They carved shoes and spoons, and that brought in
money. It would have been wronging the Jeppe-Janses to call
them poor people.

Little Ib, a boy seven years old, the only child of the family,
would sit by, looking at the workmen, cutting at a stick, and oc-
casionally cutting his finger. But one day Ib succeeded so well
with two pieces’of wood, that they really looked like little wooden
shoes; and these he wanted to give to little Christine. And who
was little Christine? She was the boatman’s daughter, and was
graceful and delicate as a gentleman’s child: had she been dif-
ferently dressed, no one would have imagined that she came out
of the hut on the neighbouring heath. There lived her father,
who was a widower, and supported himself by carrying firewood
in his great boat out of the forest to the estate of Silkeborg, with
its great eel-pond and eel-weir, and sometimes even to the distant
little town of Randers. He had no one who could take care of
little Christine, and therefore the child was almost always with
him in his boat, or in the forest among the heath plants and bar-
berry bushes. Sometimes, when he had to go as far as the town,
he would bring little Christine, who was a year younger than Ib,
to stay with the Jeppe-Janses.

lb and Christine agreed very well in every particular: they
divided their bread and berries when they were hungry, they dug
in the ground together for treasures, and they ran, and crept, and
played about everywhere. And one day they ventured together
up the high ridge, and a long way into the forest; once they
found a few snipe’s eggs there, and that was a great event for
them.

lb had never been on the heath where Christine’s father lived,
nor had he ever been on the river. But éven this was to happen;
for Christine’s father once invited him to go with them, and on
the evening before the excursion he followed the boatman over
the heath to the house of the latter.

Next morning early, the two children were sitting high up on
the pile of firewood in the boat, eating bread and whistleberries.
Christine’s father and his assistant propelled the boat with staves.
They had the current with them, and swiftly they glided down the
stream, through the lakes it forms in its course, and which some-
times seemed shut in by reeds and water-plants, though there was
always room for them to pass, and though the old trees bent quite
forward over the water, and the old oaks bent down their bare
branches, as if they had turned up their sleeves, and wanted to
show their knotty naked arms. Old elder trees, which the stream
had washed away from the bank, clung with their fibrous routs