"Then the companion said: 'Now we must part. I can't stay with you any longer.'
"But the lad would not part from him, he would not lose him for much or little. Well, he went with them a quarter of a mile more; but farther he could not go and when the lad begged and prayed him to go home and stay with him altogether, or at least as long as they had drunk his home-coming ale in his father's house, the companion said, 'No. That could not be. Now he must part, for he heard heaven's bells ringing for him.' He was the vintner who had stood in the block of ice outside the church door, whom all spat upon; and he had been his companion and helped him because he had given all he had to get him peace and rest in Christian earth.
"'I had leave,' he said, 'to follow you a year, and now the year is out.'
"When he was gone the lad laid together all his wealth in a safe place, and went home without any baggage. Then they drank his home-coming ale, till the news spread far and wide, over seven kingdoms, and when they had got to the end of the feast, they had carting and carrying all the winter both with the billygoats and the twelve horses which his father had before they got all that gold and silver safely carted home."
When Anders had ended _The Companion_, that strangely wild story, we all admired it, but he too had his call, and, turning to Karin, he said,
"Now do you tell _The Shopboy and his Cheese_. I know you know it, for I heard you telling it to the children last winter over the stove."
"Once on a time there was a shopboy who was so well liked by all who knew him, that they thought him too good to stand behind the counter with a yard measure, and weights and scales. So they made up their minds to send him out with a venture to foreign parts, and they let him choose what he would take out. He chose old cheese, and set off with it to Turkey. There he sold his cheeses very well; but as he was on his way home, he met two who had slain a man, and it was not enough that they had slain him in this life, but they ill-treated his body after he was dead. This the shopboy could not bear to see, how wickedly they behaved; so he bought the body of them and got a grave with his money, and buried it, and then he had spent all he had.