cult stairs to the loom-room many times a day. It was not so much for chatter they came—for Soldier Svens was a reticent and diligent man—as to watch the work, to see how a shoe was made, from the stretching of the leather on the last to the cutting out of the bootlaces.
The shoemaker, who usually sat with drooping head, brightened when he heard Lieutenant Lagerlöf's footstep on the stairs. He and the Lieutenant were old regiment comrades. After they had discussed brogans, sole-leather, and boot-grease a while, they fell to reminiscing about Trossnäs Field, and when they were well warmed up to it, the Lieutenant would coax the shoemaker to sing an old war song which was unlike any other battle hymn in that it began thus: We heroes from Sweden, we do not love to fight. That song the soldiers had made up when they marched down to Denmark in the year 1848 on the expedition known as the "Sandwich War."
Singularly enough, Shoemaker Svens loved to talk about Tailor Lager, who had sat many a time in that very room in the days of the Paymaster of the Regiment, and who was as merry and full of fun as he was grave and mournful.
"You have probably heard. Lieutenant, how the tailor came to be called Lager," the shoemaker began.
The Lieutenant knew the story as well as he knew his "Our Father," but all the same he replied:
"I may have heard it, Svens, but you tell it—in your way."
