We've so many things altogether. I am a stranger here myself--as indeed I
am everywhere--yet I could reckon up a host of things we have besides the
river. Was the town a big place once upon a time? No, it has been a little
town for two hundred and fifty years. But there was once a great man over
all the smaller folk--one who rode lordly fashion with a servant behind
him--a great landowner. Now we are all equal; saving, perhaps, with
Engineer Lassen, this something-and-twenty-year-old Inspector of rafting
sections, who can afford two rooms at his hotel.
I have nothing to do, and find myself pondering over the following matter:
Here is a big house, somewhere about a couple of hundred years old, the
house of the wealthy Ole Olsen Ture. It is of enormous size, a house of
two stories, the length of a whole block; it is used as a depot now. In
the days when that house was built there was no lack of giant timber
hereabouts; three beams together make the height of a man, and the wood is
hard as iron; nothing can bite on it.
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