Father is away visiting a sick person, don’t you see?”

“Someone is driving up the hill behind us. I hear the creaking from under the runners. What if it’s him who’s coming!”

The girl listened, peering, then she started to wail.

“It’s Father,” she sobbed. “He’s going to kill me. He’s going to kill me.”

“Well, now, good counsel is hard to find and quick thinking better than silver and gold,” said the beggar.

“Look,” said the child, “you can help me. Take the rope and pull the sled, then Father will think it’s yours.”

“Then what shall I do with it?” asked the beggar, putting the rope across his shoulders.

“Pull it wherever you want to for now, but come up to the parsonage with it when it gets dark. You can be sure I’ll be watching you. You must come with the sack and the sled, do you understand?”

“I’ll have to try.”

“God have mercy on you, if you don’t come,” called the girl, as she ran away from him, hurrying home before her father.

The beggar turned the sled with a heavy heart and pushed it down to the inn.

The poor wretch had had a dream, as he walked in the snow with half-naked feet. He had been thinking about the great forests north of Löven, about the great Finnmark forests.

Down here in Bro parish, where he was now traveling along the strait that connects upper and lower Löven, in these parts renowned for wealth and joyfulness, with estate next to estate, ironworks by ironworks: here every road was too heavy for him, every room too narrow, every bed too hard. Here he must bitterly long for the peace of the great, endless forests.

Here he could hear flails pounding at every barn, as if the grain would never be completely threshed. Loads of timber and charcoal wagons came unceasingly down from the inexhaustible forests. Endless ore carts traversed the roads in deep tracks, which hundreds of predecessors had carved out. Here he saw sledges, filled with passengers, hurry between the farms, and it seemed to him as though joy were holding the reins, and beauty and love were standing on the runners. Oh, how the poor wretch longed to be up in the peace of the great, endless forests!

Over there, where the trees stand up straight like pillars from the even ground, where the snow rests in heavy layers on the motionless branches, where the wind is powerless, only playing quietly in the topmost needles, there he wished to wander farther and farther in, until one day his strength would fail him, and he would fall down under the great trees, dying of hunger and cold.

He longed for the great, murmuring grave above Löven, where he would be overpowered by the forces of disintegration, where hunger, cold, weariness, and liquor would finally succeed in killing this poor body, which could endure anything.

He had arrived at the inn; there he would wait for evening. He went into the serving room and sat in dull repose on the bench by the door, dreaming of the endless forests.

The proprietress took pity on him and gave him a dram of liquor. She even gave him two, because he asked so eagerly.

But more than that she would not give him, and the beggar fell into drunken despair. He must drink more of this strong, sweet liquor. He must once again feel his heart dance in his body and his thoughts flare in intoxication. Oh, this sweet grain wine! Summer sun, summer birdsong, summer scent and beauty were floating around in its white wake. One more time, before he vanishes in night and darkness, he wants to drink sun and happiness.

So first he traded away the flour, then the flour sack, and finally the sled for liquor. From this he got good and drunk, and slept away a good part of the afternoon on a bench at the inn.

When he awoke, he realized that there was only one thing left for him to do. Because this wretched body had taken all dominion over his soul, because he could drink up what a child had entrusted to him, because he was a disgrace to the earth, he must free it from the burden of so much wretchedness. He must give freedom back to his soul, let it go to God.

Lying on the bench in the inn, he judged himself: “Gösta Berling, defrocked minister, accused of having drunk up the flour of a hungry child, sentenced to death. Death by what means? Death in the snowdrifts.”

He seized his cap and stumbled out. He was neither completely awake nor completely sober. He wept in pity for himself, for his pitiful, soiled soul, which he must set free.

He did not go far and he did not stray from the road. By the roadside itself there was a high snowdrift. There he threw himself down to die. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

No one knows how long he lay like that, but there was still life in him when the daughter of the Broby minister came running along the road with a lantern in her hand and found him in the drift by the roadside. She had stood for hours, waiting for him; now she had run up the hills of Broby trying to find him.

She recognized him at once, and then she started shaking him and shouting with all her might to get him to wake up.

She had to know what he had done with her sack of flour.

She had to call him back to life at least long enough so that he could tell her what had become of her sled and her flour sack.