If you kept a careful watch at the corners, you might perhaps see that there were those who were out to meet the flock of geese." "Then it would be better if you came down on _them_ instead of the poor girls," replied Mother Baekken obstinately; "a man like that clerk down at the contractor's, and him at the Stores, and then that fine clerk, that Veyergang up at the factory and his friends." Barbara was standing at the counter with a customer.
Nobody must say anything against her Ludvig.

She knew him; she had been with him day and night for fourteen years.

If she only had a halfpenny for every time he had cried and screamed for Barbara! She would have enlarged upon the subject, if it had not been for the man at her back who was calling out for his soft soap.
So cup-and-leech-Mother Taraldsen went on, saying that the girls stood poking their heads out of every single gate the whole way up the street; she saw it so well when she came home from applying leeches of an evening.
She and Anne Graves then began to review the young people more closely.
There were some they would not even mention, and some they named with all sorts of interesting doubts and opinions, and lastly some they only stopped to wonder that they had nothing whatever to say either about or against.
As to Barbara, she noticed carefully what was said about Silla, and made up her mind that Nikolai should be warned; he should at any rate know what he was doing when he went and took that girl.
And neither was it with a diminishing-glass she let him see it, as time after time she referred to all the dangers the young factory-girls up there were exposed to.

She had sufficient instinct not to mention Silla, so that he should not think she was speaking against her.

But every time she touched upon it, she saw well, that it went into Nikolai, and had fully the effect she wished.
Barbara had made some of these remarks this evening too, and Nikolai was sitting gloomily listening to the noise outside.
One party after another was flying past down the high-road on sledges, like shadows in the moonlight, with shouts and cries--half-grown lads and lassies, and now and then a party of fine people from the town below.