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286 SKETCHES.
shape of huts and cottages up the sides of the hills or
downwards to the common; every thing becomes smaller,
narrower, poorer; the town is absorbed by the country, and
the street by the turnpike road. Here the poor people
live. It is the world of the cryptogamia of town life.
Still the student loves to point his spy-glass at them, to
try to discover the great, the important, in the seemingly
insignificant.
Here, far out upon the outskirts, is a narrow street, and
in that street stands a small house, and in that house dwells
an old couple. Young, blooming bride! can you think it
possible that the woman there was fifty-seven years old
when-she was married to her equally old husband; and
would you believe it, that the little god, who flies from so
many young and handsome couples in those fine houses in
town, has taken up his abode with the old couple, there in
the small cottage in that narrow street? Yet so it is.
Husband and wife love one another with all their heart,
and surprise each other often with small improvements in
their home. The old woman showed me her kitchen stove.
It had formerly been low and inconvenient. The old man
could not bear to see how the wife was obliged to bend
her back when employed at it. He once watched the op-
portunity when she was absent for a couple of days, and
had it altered and raised a foot. Now it was “the best
kitchen stove in the world,” and cheerfully must the fire
dance on the hearth and shine in the little room. I do not
think that I would look at the ruins of the Coliseuin in
Rome with so much pleasure as at that kitchen-stove. The
old woman boasted also of a small bit of a garden with one
tree in it, and a “real bower” of half-naked lilac-tree
branches covered with spider-webs. “Swedish poverty!”
I thought, and remembered what is expressed in these two
words : to find one’s self rich with little, with almost nothing.
I peeped accidentally into a dark closet ; a shadowy form
in it made a curtsey fo me. It was a woman seventy years
¢
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