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burn your cloth or yarn so it rots. Use too little, and the
color will ne-ever be fast—no, not if it’s dyed with the
most pre-cious logwood. Therefore the mordant is a closed
geheimnis which a man does not give away except it be to
his son, but to the journeymen—never! No—”
“Ay, Master Gert,” said the trader, “ay, ay!”
“As I was saying,” Gert went on, “about half a score
of years ago I had a ’prentice whose mother was a Swede.
He’d set his mind on finding out what mordant I used for
cinnamon brown, but as I always mixed it behind closed
doors, ’t was not so easy to smoke it. So what does he do,
the rascal? There’s so much vermin here round the
Fountain, it eats our wool and our linen, and for that reason
we always hang up the stuff people give us to dye in canvas
sacks under the loft-beams. So what does he do, the devil’s
gesindchen, but gets him one of the ’prentices to hang him up
in a sack. And I came in and weighed and mixed and made
ready and was half done, when it happened so curiously
that the cramp got in one of his legs up there, and he began
to kick and scream for me to help him down. Did I help
him? Death and fire! But ’t was a scurvy trick he did me,
yes, yes, yes! And so they are, the Swedes; you can never
trust ’em over a doorstep.”
“Faith, they’re ugly folk, the Swedes,” spoke Erik
Lauritzen. “They’ve nothing to set their teeth in at home,
so when they come to foreign parts they can never get their
bellyful. They’re like poor-house children; they eat for
today’s hunger and for to-morrow’s and yesterday’s all in
one. Thieves and cut-purses they are, too—worse than
crows and corpse-plunderers—and so murderous. It’s not
for nothing people say: Quick with the knife like Lasse
Swede!”
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