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Mrs. Lieders wiped her eyes, saying: “Oh, yes, Danke schon, I aint afraid ’cause I tied him with the rope, righd good, so he don’t got no chance to move. He was make faces at me all the time I tied him.” At the remembrance, the tears welled anew.

Mrs. Olsen, a little bright tinted woman with a nose too small for her big blue eyes and chubby cheeks, quivered with indignant sympathy.

“Well, I did nefer hear of sooch a mean acting man!” seemed to her the most natural expression; but the wife fired, at once.

“No, he is not a mean man,” she cried, “no, Freda Olsen, he is not a mean man at all! There aint nowhere a better man than my man; and Carl Olsen, he knows that. Kurt, he always buys a whole ham and a whole barrel of flour, and never less than a dollar of sugar at a time! And he never gits drunk nor he never gives me any bad talk. It was only he got this wanting to kill himself on him, sometimes.”

“Well, I guess I’ll go put on my things,” said Mrs. Olsen, wisely declining to defend her position. “You set right still and warm yourself, and we’ll be back in a minute.”

Indeed, it was hardly more than that time before both Carl Olsen, who worked in the same furniture factory as Kurt Lieders, and was a comely and after-witted giant, appeared with Mrs. Olsen ready for the street.

He nodded at Mrs. Lieders and made a gurgling noise in his throat, expected to convey sympathy. Then, he coughed and said that he was ready, and they started.

Feeling further expression demanded, Mrs. Olsen asked: “How many times has he done it, Mrs. Lieders?”

Mrs. Lieders was trotting along, her anxious eyes on the house in the distance, especially on the garret windows. “Three times,” she answered, not removing her eyes; “onct he tooked Rough on Rats and I found it out and I put some apple butter in the place of it, and he kept wondering and wondering how he didn’t feel notings, and after awhile I got him off the notion, that time. He wasn’t mad at me; he just said: ‘Well, I do it some other time. You see!’ but he promised to wait till I got the spring house cleaning over, so he could shake the carpets for me; and by and by he got feeling better. He was mad at the boss and that made him feel bad. The next time it was the same, that time he jumped into the cistern—-“

“Yes, I know,” said Olsen, with a half grin, “I pulled him out.”

“It was the razor he wanted,” the wife continued, “and when he come home and says he was going to leave the shop and he aint never going back there, and gets out his razor and sharps it, I knowed what that meant and I told him I got to have some bluing and wouldn’t he go and get it? and he says, ‘You won’t git another husband run so free on your errands, Thekla,’ and I says I don’t want none; and when he was gone I hid the razor and he couldn’t find it, but that didn’t mad him, he didn’t say notings; and when I went to git the supper he walked out in the yard and jumped into the cistern, and I heard the splash and looked in and there he was trying to git his head under, and I called, ‘For the Lord’s sake, papa! For the Lord’s sake!’ just like that. And I fished for him with the pole that stood there and he was sorry and caught hold of it and give in, and I rested the pole agin the side cause I wasn’t strong enough to h’ist him out; and he held on whilest I run for help—-“

“And I got the ladder and he clum out,” said the giant with another grin of recollection, “he was awful wet!”