But then it seemed to Toad as if she hadn’t a moment’s peace for prying into pots and pans. Her mistress was going backwards and forwards continually, between storeroom and pantry, after meal, or sugar, or butter, or syrup for the lefser. The storeroom door was ajar for her all day long.
So at last Toad grew downright wild. She was determined to put an end to all this racket. So she took it upon her to well smear the threshold of the storeroom with green soap.
Next morning her mistress came bustling along first thing with butter and a wooden ladle in a bowl, and she slipped and fell in the opening between the stairs and the storehouse door.
There she lay till Toad dragged her up.
She carried her in to her husband with such a crying and yelling that it was heard all over the depot. Madame had been regularly worrying herself to death with all this bustle, said she, and now the poor soul had fallen and broken her leg.
But the one who cried the most, and didn’t know what to do with himself when he heard such weeping and wailing over his wife, was the general dealer.
None knew the real worth of that kitchen wench, said he.
And so it was Toad who now superintended everything, and both dispensed the stores and made provision for the household.
She drove all the hired cooks and pancake rollers out of the house—they were only eating her master out of house and home, she said.
The lefser were laid together without any syrup between them, and she gave out fat instead of butter. She distributed it herself, and packed it up in their Nistebommers.46
Never had the general dealer known the heavy household business disposed of so quickly as it was that year. He was quite astonished.
And he was really dumbfounded when Toad took him up into the storeroom, and showed him how little had been consumed, and how the cured shoulders of mutton and the hams hung down from the rafters in rows and rows.
“So long as things went on as they were going now,” said he, “she should have the control of the household like mother herself,” for his wife was now bedridden in her room upstairs.
And at Yuletide Toad baked and roasted, and cut things down so finely that her fellow-servants were almost driven to chew their wooden spoons and gnaw bones.
But such fat calves, and such ribs of pork, and such lefser filled with both syrup and butter, and such mölje47 and splendid fare for the guests that came to his house at Christmas-time the general dealer had never seen before.
Then the general dealer took her by the arm, and right down into the shop they both went together.
She might take what she would, said he, both of kirtles and neckerchiefs and other finery, so that she might dress and go in and out as if she were mother herself; and she might provide herself with beads and silk as much as she liked. There was nothing that she might not have.
But when the bailiff and the sexton sat at cards, and Toad came in to lay the tablecloth, they were like to have rolled off their chairs. Such a sight they had never seen before. Toad had rigged herself up with all manner of parti-coloured ’kerchiefs, and trimmed her hairy poll with blue and yellow and green ribbons till it looked like a carthorse’s tail. But they said nothing, for the sake of the general dealer, who thought she looked so smart, and was calling her in continually.
And they were forced to confess that the wench spared neither meat nor ale nor brandy. And on the third evening, when they got so drunk that they lay there like logs, she carried them off to bed as if they were sucking babes.
And so it went on, with feasting and entertaining, right up to the twentieth day after Christmas Day, and beyond it.
And that wench Toad used to smirk and stare about the room; and whenever they didn’t laugh or jest enough with her, she would plant herself right in the middle of the floor, and turn herself about in all her finery to attract notice, and say, “It’s me!”
And when the guests left the house they must needs admit that the general dealer was right when he said that such serving-maids were not to be picked up every day.
But those folks who went a-fishing for the general dealer, and had their provisions put up for them beforehand, were not slow to mark that Toad had the control of the shop and stores likewise.
So it happened as might only have been expected. Their provisions ran short, and they had to return home just as the cod was biting best, while all the other fishermen sailed further out and made first-rate hauls.
The general dealer was like to have had apoplexy on the day that he saw his boats lying empty by the bridge in the height of the fishing season. His men came up in a body to the shop, headed by their eldest foreman, and laid a complaint before him.
The food that had been packed into their boxes and baskets, they said, couldn’t be called human food at all. The lefser were so hard, they said, that it was munch munch all day; there was only rancid fat on them, with scarcely a glimpse of bacon; and as for the cured shoulders of mutton, one had scarcely shaved off a thin slice when one scraped against the bare bone.
Up into the storeroom went the general dealer like a shot.
But as for Toad,
