Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/189

 long wavy movement. The low buildings are old farmhouses, proving that not so very long ago these were the outskirts of the town.

Everywhere a rather comfortable and familiar informality prevailed. At the open window on a ground floor a young woman gave her child the breast; opposite, in a sunlit window above, a man in shirt sleeves smoked his pipe and stared across at his neighbour's roof, on the ridge of which a white cat was walking cautiously. A well-dressed man, who looked like a student, passed us with a glass mug filled with foaming beer, which he had fetched from the beer-house at the corner.

The children playing in front of the houses greeted Minna, and a little urchin of a girl, three to four years of age, with curly hair and a face full of dimples came flying along, with her poor naked legs as bent as swords, and was not content until Minna had chased her into a passage, where she allowed herself to be caught.

Less pleasing was the attention from the bigger children. A tall, bare-headed girl, with dirty stockings and trodden-down slippers, continued to shout after Minna, "Who's 'e?" And a shoemaker's boy walking in the middle of the street, who, to my astonishment, was whistling the Actors' march from the Midsummer Night's Dream so that it sounded through the whole neighbourhood, must have found something Jewish in my appearance, for he suddenly interrupted his occupation and continued to shout after me "Itzig." Sometimes all voices were drowned in the rumble of an immense waggon, the barrel-shaped canvas roof of which swayed up to the height of the windows on the first floor; a couple of heavy horses, with thick necks and muscular haunches, pulled it with a slow lumbering walk while they shook their shiny brass ornaments of