Potatoes can be served with what you please; a dish of milk, a
herring, is enough. The rich eat them with butter; poor folk manage
with a tiny pinch of salt. Isak could make a feast of them on Sundays,
with a mess of cream from Goldenhorns' milk. Poor despised potato--a
blessed thing!
But now--things look black even for the potato crop.
Isak looked at the sky unnumbered times in the day. And the sky was
blue. Many an evening it looked as if a shower were coming. Isak would
go in and say, "Like as not we'll be getting that rain after all." And
a couple of hours later all would be as hopeless as before.
The drought had lasted seven weeks now, and the heat was serious;
the potatoes stood all the time in flower; flowering marvellously,
unnaturally. The cornfields looked from a distance as if under snow.
Where was it all to end? The almanac said nothing--almanacs nowadays
were not what they used to be; an almanac now was no good at all. Now
it looked like rain again, and Isak went in to Inger: "We'll have rain
this night, God willing.
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