Repository path: workshop/translations/koyhaa-kansaa/R05-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-koyhaa-kansaa-R05-v1 — Minna Canth, «Köyhää kansaa» (1886), Finnish → English

The second long work of ARM-atelier-cycle. Append-only under R05: each span is added below, nothing already frozen is revised except through a numbered erratum at the foot, and the decision log is continuously numbered across the whole work.

Source

Minna Canth (1844–1897), «Köyhää kansaa», first published 1886. Text from Project Gutenberg ebook 13976 (Köyhää kansaa; Salakari, Otava, Helsinki, 1917), fetched 2026-08-01 by direct HTTPS GET of https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13976.txt.utf-8. Public domain (Canth d. 1897; the volume is a 1917 reprint of an 1886 text).

The novella is stored whole and cleaned as ../source-fi-full.txt — 573 paragraphs, 13,525 Finnish words, boilerplate stripped, paragraph indices stable and load-bearing (R05 rule 1). Span boundaries below are paragraph ranges into that file. Span 1 is also stored separately as ../span-1-source.txt so that what was in front of the translator is fixed in git.

The work has two chapters only (I at paragraph 1, II at paragraph 279), so spans are sub-chapter and are cut at scene breaks, not at word counts.

Span plan, declared at step 1 as the arm requires

Eight spans of ~1,700 Finnish words, which EXCEEDS the arm's stated norm of 4–6 visits, and the overrun is declared here rather than discovered at span 5. The estimate was written before span 1 and then corrected against it, because the first guess was wrong in a way worth recording.

The guess: the authorized 1886 Swedish translation of this same text runs 18,131 words to the Finnish's 13,525, a factor of 1.34, so English ought to land near 18,000.

The measurement: span 1 came out at 2,699 English words from 1,795 Finnish — a factor of 1.50, which projects the finished English at ~20,300 words. English expands from Finnish appreciably more than Swedish does, and that is not an accident of one span: Swedish shares the Baltic-area vocabulary, the compounding habit and much of Canth's own bilingual idiom, where English has to unpack every case ending into a preposition and every participial chain into a clause.

The consequence: 20,300 English words is 1.8× Verga's 11,474, which ARM-longwork translated in six visits at ~1,900 English words each. At span 1's actual load this work needs eight. Eight is chosen over six-at-3,400 because 3,400 words is the size at which a log stops being written decision by decision, and the log is what the arm is for. The arm may prefer to revise its cadence instead of its span size; that call belongs to the arm, and this page states the arithmetic so it can be made. The cadence itself is unchanged and is the arm's: one visit at least every three sessions, and under-visiting is the alarm.

The plan was declared as EIGHT spans and finished in SEVEN, and the revision is D113. Spans 7 and 8 were collapsed into one because the collation gate that took half of S105 and a third of S110 was discharged at span 6 and no gate was owed here, and because the remainder — 2,572 words — was 26% above the largest previous span and not twice it. Step 8 of ARM-atelier-cycle is therefore the craft report alone. The step-1 arithmetic is worth keeping honest against the outcome: it projected ~20,300 finished English words from span 1's factor of 1.50, and the seven spans come to 20,276. The projection was right to 0.1%, and the factor fell monotonically after span 3 (1.50, 1.55, 1.548, 1.526, 1.461, 1.452, 1.476) rather than holding — the two errors cancelled.

Contamination

Declared none, and the measurement was NOT RUN because its comparator does not exist. The two statements are compatible here in a way they were not at S084, and the difference is the whole basis of the declaration. Full record, including the search routes and what remains unmeasured: ../contamination.md.

Span 1 — paragraphs 2–75 (chapter I, opening to the end of the bread scene)

Anni was ill. All night she never closed her eyes, only moaned and fretted. The mother sat up by the cradle, rocking her and singing. Time and again she tried taking her up into her arms and hushing her softly there; tried giving her the breast; tried pressing her gently against herself; tried stroking her quiet. All in vain. The child twisted and cried; her mouth was hot, her body burned, and her breath came in gasps. And there was not even a light: the little stub of tallow candle had burned itself out early in the night, the wick guttering down into the socket and going black. In the black dark Mari was left with her sick child. A couple of tears started into her eyes, but she wiped them away and tried to swallow down the bitter lump in her throat. Crying was no help anyway; she knew that from before. It eased the mind for a little while, true enough, but what of that, when the eyes began to ache instead.

The night was long, it simply would not come to an end. The room felt bleak. She sat on the edge of the bed with a scrap of a skirt round her. Her feet hung bare below, and they were cold, but she could not be troubled to get up and fetch stockings — she was used to worse, and thought nothing of this much. Gladly enough she would have stretched her tired body out on the bed, but that Anni would not allow her.

The man lay on the wall side, snoring. He did not wake the whole night, though the child whined. Only as the morning began to grey did he turn over, opening his eyes a crack at the same time.

"What ails her?" he asked.

"Ill, I suppose."

The man scarcely heard the answer; he had gone back to sleep. The older children were sleeping heavy on the floor too — Hellu, Petu and Ville. They had one thin blanket; the mother spread her jacket over the younger ones as well, Petu and Ville. She had not the heart to wake even Hellu yet, but went herself to the shed for wood, to get a fire into the stove, and left Anni for that while to her own devices. But when she came back Hellu was already on her knees beside the cradle, clapping her hands, coaxing and playing a thousand tricks for Anni, who screamed all the same fit to die. The mother threw the logs down in front of the stove and took the child up. She told Hellu to make the fire. The man was awake again too, and lay watching the mother work until she got the child at last to quiet a little.

"Hadn't you better take her to the doctor?" he said.

"I don't know," the mother answered wearily. "Whether there's any help in their medicines either."

"It'd be worth the trying, all the same."

"And do they care that much about a poor woman's child, to give her the proper ones even."

"They speak well of that Wialén. A kind-natured man, they say."

The wife said nothing. That bitter lump had risen in her throat again and the tears ran freely down her cheeks.

"I'll go and ask the district inspector for a ticket, then you can get to the doctor first thing."

"Do that," the wife answered quietly, and wiped the water off her face on the rag the child was wrapped in.

Hellu blew into the stove and could not get it to catch, for the wood was wet. The mother went to help her, the child on her arm.

Then she took the little black coffee pot from the corner and poured a little water over the old grounds.

"Don't go out before you've drunk a drop of coffee," she said to the man, who had got himself dressed.

The man said nothing, only threw a long look at the pot.

"You mean it's nothing but water?" said the wife, who caught the look. "Not so bad as that. There's grounds in the bottom, and chicory to go in besides."

Hellu was warming herself in front of the stove. She held out her small thin hands towards the fire and rubbed them together now and then. She was a pitiful sight, the poor girl, her eyes bad — with the one she could still see a little, with the other nothing at all. There was a great scar on her neck, and her body was so wretchedly shrunken that nobody would have taken her for more than five at the outside, though she had turned eight. But she was always quiet and content; she minded little Anni the day long and was a right hand to her mother. That was why she could not be taken to the infirmary either. She was needed at home; without her the mother could never have got away from the child at all.

The pot was boiling already. Mari laid Anni in the cradle and asked Hellu to rock her. The child had gone off to sleep, and they tried to keep quiet so as not to wake her.

While the coffee settled, the mother got out what was left of the sugar. There was so much of it that each of them got a scrap. She broke it into pieces on the soft pillow of the bed, so that no knock should carry to Anni's ears. For herself she chose the smallest share and gave the man the largest. Then she poured out, and all three of them drank. It was hot at any rate and did them good. Hellu's small brown eyes shone with contentment even in their darkness, where she squatted on the floor drinking and working the cradle with her left hand. She bit off only the tiniest crumb of sugar at a time, and it lasted her well, though it melted away in her mouth in a moment.

The man pulled on his jacket, took his cap off the nail and went. The wife looked after him, saw how his trousers had gone at the seat, and sighed. Where was she to get a patch for them again, and where thread. The point was broken off her needle too — but Tiina Katri would lend her one of hers, perhaps. Tiina Katri was better placed than most. She had only the one child, and an uncommonly provident man. Holpainen looked after his own too, right enough, and never wasted a penny of it on drink when he had one. But he was slow by nature and was generally too late when there was a job to be had. The others always got there before him, and especially now, when every soul was short of earnings. The wife often fretted about it to herself; but she had not the heart to say much to the man, seeing the poor creature was vexed enough without it. And what could he do about it, when he tried his best and it came to nothing all the same.

Petu and Ville woke up. They were both of them healthy, cheerful boys, if a little too wild with it; the one five years old, the other three. But they ate a great deal, and nothing would go round. They were hungry always and always after bread. Nor could the mother easily make them mind her. Their father they were a little afraid of, at least. When he snapped out a hard word the boys did not dare draw breath, but sat nicely off to one side and goggled up at him from under their brows for a while.

The mother had kept the pot warm in the mouth of the stove. She poured them a drop of coffee each and gave them both their share of the sugar. The boys squabbled over whose was the bigger, measuring the pieces and holding them up against each other. But then they were in a hurry, when Hellu reminded them the coffee was going cold.

The mother made up the bed and tidied the room; the boys got up to dress. They were soon ready, for they had not many garments between them. Petu had nothing but an old girl's frock the mayor's wife had given, flounced and trimmed, but faded badly. The buttons were gone from the back; the mother fastened it at the top with a pin, and it did no harm that his shirt pushed out through the long opening. Nobody would have known Petu for a boy now, but he cared not a rap. There were trimmings on the hem of the skirt, and he looked at them with pleasure. Ville, for his part, had a sort of trousers, the gift of some lady too, and they had pockets, in which Ville's hands were exceedingly comfortable.

The moment the boys were in their clothes they began, almost with one mouth, to want bread. But the mother scolded them.

"You've hardly got your eyes open before you're hungry," she said. "You might get out from under my feet a while at least, out into the yard there, till I've done the room."

The boys obeyed this time. They pulled the old broken shoes onto their feet and went off out, like good children, without a murmur.

The mother swept the floor, saw to the stove, put things straight and set things to rights. Anni was sleeping peacefully now, and Hellu sat by her and rocked away faithfully. When Anni stirred a hand or turned her head she would start to sing, "hss-s, hss-s, aa-a, aa-a," and Anni would sink back at once into sleep. The boys stayed out a good while, but Mari had not had time to wonder at it before Tiina Katri came flying in, out of breath.

"Where are those boys of yours?" she cried, without saying good morning.

"In the yard. Why?"

"Because they've taken a loaf off me. Very near a whole loaf, that I'd only just had out of the oven and set in the passage to cool. I'd cut nothing but a little heel off the side of it."

She stopped, out of breath.

"Lord bless us!" said the mother, and struck her hands together.

"You ought to keep your children in better order, all the same," Tiina Katri went on. "I shouldn't have minded a smaller piece, but when they make off with the whole loaf."

"We'll go and get hold of the boys. They can't have had time to eat it yet."

They went out together, the mother in front and Tiina Katri behind. And the mother caught sight of Petu at once, running to hide behind the corner when he heard the door go.

"Come out of there," she roared. "And this minute!"

The boy had to step out. Fear and the hope of getting off went back and forth across his face. His hands were behind his back.

"Where's the bread? Show me your claws."

Petu brought his hands out in front; they were empty.

"I'll teach you," the mother threatened, and went to look behind the corner. But she found no bread there either.

"And Ville? Where's he got to?"

Petu pointed with his finger at the woodshed, and the two women both went in. They peered about them, but could see nothing.

"Ville!" the mother called.

No answer came. But now, their eyes having got used to the dimness, they made out the boy in the corner. Scolding as she went, the mother climbed over the logs to him.

"So you won't answer, you rascal, when you're called."

Ville's mouth was full. He looked calmly at the pair of them and went on eating. In his hand was another piece of the soft new bread.

"There it is, then," said Tiina Katri.

The mother snatched the plunder off the boy and struck his fingers.

"Where did you get it? Did Petu give it you? Don't cry — speak up nicely when your mother asks you, speak, my child. Did Petu give it you?"

"Petu — waah."

"And where did Petu put the rest?"

"Over there — waah."

He pointed with his finger at an upturned tub, and began to cry harder still when he remembered his own hunk, left behind in his mother's hand.

The loaf was found under the tub, but there was nothing left of it except the crust; the inside was all dug out. Tiina Katri threw it a contemptuous glance.

"Let it be," she said. "I dare say I'll be none the poorer for it."

Angry she looked, all the same, as she turned to go.

"I'll make this good, the minute I get to a baking," Mari called after her.

"And when will that day dawn," muttered Tiina Katri, stepping out of the shed door into the yard.

Mari did not quite catch what she said, but she guessed near enough. It showed in her walk and her whole bearing that Tiina Katri was not in a good humour. This came hard. Many a time in her need she had had help from Tiina Katri; now there would surely be an end of that, and how was she ever to dare go and ask again.

She put the crust under her arm, snatched a switch out of the broom and took Ville by the arm. The boy was still bawling; he was afraid it was for him.

"Will you be quiet," said the mother, and took him indoors.

Petu was sitting on the floor by the stove with his back against the wall. He saw the switch in his mother's hand at once and began to cry. Rightly guessed: the mother came straight at him with a set face. And it was no use though the boy kicked and twisted and threw himself down full length and screamed as loud as his throat would let him. The mother had strength enough left to whirl him neatly over onto his stomach, lift the skirts of the frock and lay the switch on the bare skin.

"Don't, mother dear, don't," Hellu had time to beg.

But little Anni woke in the uproar and Hellu had her hands full. She had to rock with both hands and sing as loud as Petu was shrieking. Little Anni did leave off at last, to listen to the other voices, not being able to get her own above them. But she did not go back to sleep, only turned her head this way and that, whimpering and looking restlessly about her.

The mother took her up and gave her the breast. The switch was in a crack in the wall. The mother's eyes went first to it, then moved to the boys, squatting quietly by the stove again, and last to the small wretched thing on her arm. There they stayed, and heavy thoughts pressed into her mind. What would fall to these unfortunates in life? And what if she should live to see them prisoners and in irons?

Sour tears ran down in a stream and dropped onto Anni. Once more she shook her fist at Petu.

"Remember, remember! If you ever once go touching what belongs to anybody again, I'll beat you into a cripple."

Petu glanced fearfully up at the switch and then turned to his mother. Wide-eyed he waited and watched to see whether the danger was at hand this minute, or whether he was to be left in peace for the present.

The mother remembered the crust and put a large piece of it into Hellu's hand. She could not eat it herself, but Hellu bit and chewed with a great appetite.

"This is so sweet, mother," she said.

It was weeks now since she had had fresh bread. They had lived a long while on dry crusts gathered by begging and on cold potatoes. That was why it tasted so good to her now. The mother gave her a second piece as well, and told her to put what was left in the cupboard for their father.

(Span 1 ends. 2,699 words of English from 1,795 words of Finnish — an expansion factor of 1.50, against the 1886 Swedish translation's 1.34 over the whole novella.)

Span 2 — paragraphs 76–133 (chapter I, the landlord's visit to the flour shop)

The tramp of a foot was heard in the passage that same moment; they thought it was him coming already. The door opened, but it was Heikura who came in, the landlord. The blood flew up into Mari's face; she guessed what was coming.

"Good morning!" said Heikura.

"God grant it," Mari answered.

"So Holpainen isn't at home?"

"He's not; but sit down, he may be here soon."

Heikura sat down on the chair at the end of the table and smoked his pipe. After a little while he began again:

"It'll be all one, I dare say, if I put my business to you. We ought to get clear about that rent, d'you see. Here's the second month nearly out, and I've not had a penny yet of the last one."

"You have not, I know it well enough," came Mari's quiet answer.

"Every man wants what's his own, d'you see. And the harder it will come for you to pay, the more the debt runs up."

"If a body could only get as far as the summer," Mari sighed.

"I can't wait so long as that, it's not to be done. If I don't get a reckoning for last month, I shall have to press you hard. There's nothing for it here but the plain truth."

"Good God, though, what's to become of us poor creatures, and these poor little children about us still. Have mercy on them at least, master dear."

Hellu had laid her piece of bread aside and was following the talk closely. It showed in her face that she understood perfectly what it meant. But the boys were playing with one another in the corner and knew nothing of the trouble.

Heikura drew a few puffs.

"It's a sad thing, right enough," he said again, "but what's to be done about it. As I said already: every man wants what's his own."

Mari cried.

"Has Holpainen still got no work anywhere?"

"No."

"That's a queer thing! Times are hard now, to be sure, but a man ought to come by a wage some time or other all the same, if only there were any push in him."

"The poor man's gone quite dull with the worry of it, and he never was one of your bold-natured ones to begin with."

"Well, I don't want to blame him; I know well enough it's hard work for a poor man to live in better times than these, let alone in such times as this."

"If you would take the bed off us, master, and the pillow that's under the blanket there, for last month's rent. They must surely be worth ten marks."

Heikura smoked his pipe and cast an eye at the bed.

"When I've talked it over with my wife. I'd sooner have had money, right enough; but since it seems to be so very close with you, I suppose one must put up with those too."

He went off to his own side of the house; but a while after he came back with another man to carry the bed away. Mari emptied the rags of bedding and the thing that passed for a mattress into the corner. The wall was left bare; the whole room rang hollow. There was not a stick of furniture in it now but the chair, the table and the cradle. The boys shifted from the stove to where the bed had stood; they had come by a new and roomier place to play in.

Mari swept the cobwebs off the wall with the broom, put the old shoes that had been kept under the bed away into the corner, and then whispered to Hellu:

"Rock the child well now, so she doesn't wake; I'm going to hear whether the ladies' society isn't beginning to give out needlework yet."

"Will you be long?"

"No longer than a blessing takes."

Hellu sat down in her old place and the mother set off into the town. Such an emptiness came into the room, and such a defencelessness, the moment she had shut the door behind her. Hellu rocked with both hands, to keep the cradle going evenly. And she watched Anni's face without stopping, so as to begin singing at once if she should open her eyes the least crack. The boys were quiet enough; everything seemed to be going well.

Mari meanwhile had come out to the gate and began to walk down the street. She had a long way to go, for they lived far out on the edge of the upper town. She walked at first as in a dream; she had not the strength to think of anything properly, nor was there the least spark of hope left in her. Still, one must try to the last — so much she still understood by instinct.

On she walked; the road seemed longer than usual.

Her strength was low; only now did she remember that she ought to have taken a bite of bread before she went out. She had sat up the whole night, and the child besides had pulled every so often at an empty breast, out of restlessness more than out of hunger. That was why she was so poorly now that she could hardly keep on her feet.

She got as far as the comptroller's house at last, for all that. The stone step that went down to the street was a comfortable place to sit and rest. It was here that she had served many a long year when she was young. How those times were changed now. Healthy she had been, and stout for work, whatever kind it might be. She took hold like a man at anything, and never gave out halfway. But it was otherwise now. Cares and sorrows, many lyings-in, and the heavy load of living had wasted the body away. She would not last the half of what she had lasted then. The comptroller's wife would gladly have kept her, and did what she could to stop her marrying. How well she knew how to say beforehand what would come of it. But there was no help for that, she had to go all the same. It must have been so appointed for her. And a body has to be content with the portion, however hard it comes.

There was talking and a step inside. She moved aside, out of the way. The door was opened and down into the street came a young lady first, and close behind her a tall handsome gentleman. The young lady Mari knew; it was Helena, the comptroller's youngest daughter, whom she had nursed when she was small and after whom Hellu was named; the gentleman, on the other hand, was quite a stranger to her. They stopped a moment in front of the steps and talked together — but in Swedish, so that Mari did not understand. Helena drew on her gloves and threw a long look sideways, at her. She did not know her, and did not greet her; turned away and went on with what she was saying to the strange gentleman. Mari's lips went into a sad smile. Who would have believed it once, that little Helena would walk past her so. How fond of each other they were in those days; she used to sit in her lap with an arm round her neck, chattering away. And she was for ever declaring that there was nobody she loved like her own dear Mari. There it was to be seen now; she did not know her any more. But that was the way of the world, and Helena was not to be blamed for it; there had been many servants in the house, and how was she to remember them all. How prettily she walked there beside the gentleman. A sweetheart, perhaps, or only an acquaintance.

"God, dear Father, bless little Helena," Mari sighed to herself, "an angel of the Lord she is, the same as when she was a child..."

She did not know her any more, but was that a wonder. Years had gone by since she last saw her, and she must certainly be dreadfully changed. Hunger and want do leave their mark on a face.

She got up to walk on again; tired she still was, true enough, but there was no sitting on that step for ever either. And the legs did move, after all, once they were fairly started...

In the upper storey of an old yellow-painted wooden house she lived, that good-natured widow, the friend and refuge of all the poor. It was to her that people went first whenever they were in want of help, and seldom did they come away from her without comfort. Good advice one got at any rate, and a kind word, if nothing else. Thither Mari's steps turned now as well, for Mrs Hiller usually knew best how to give an account of the ladies' society's doings.

At home she was; she stood at the little stove getting her dinner. The room was neat and clean; a cheerful contentment shone out of every corner of it. A canary chirruped in its cage by the window; a fat white-and-brindled cat stretched itself on the bed. The lady looked at her kindly, gave her good day and asked how things were. Mari laid her business before her; told her all her cares and all her wants. She told it as a child tells its mother, or a friend a friend. The words came from the heart, and to the heart they went. The lady heard her out with a sympathising tenderness, but it would not be till the following week, she said, that needlework would be given out; and there would not be much of it, only a mark's worth in the week.

"That's a help too," said Mari, "and maybe I shouldn't get through much more than that now, with Anni ill."

The poor had multiplied very greatly; the ladies' society's funds were comparatively small. So limits had to be set, and work given only to those who were in the worst distress and had the biggest families — several children at home, the husband dead or ill, and so on. The district ladies would go round to everybody to inspect, and would give a ticket to those who were to be helped first. The lady promised to speak for Mari and to send in her name, so that they would know to call at her home. The lady knew her situation well enough, but for order's sake the rules had to be followed all the same.

How warm Mari's heart felt as she left the room. Going down the stairs she prayed earnestly to God for a blessing on all good people, but above all on her who lived in that plain garret room and led a life unnoticed by the eyes of the world in works of self-giving love. Her wages she would not get here; but beyond the grave God would truly remember her — of that Mari was quite certain.

She had come to the white corner building where the flour shop was. She stopped. Tiina Katri's loaf came into her mind. If they would let her have flour on credit out of that shop, she could put that right at once. Would she dare go in and try? She would pay for it soon enough, when she got earning by the needlework. She took heart and went in. She was a little acquainted with the shopwoman, who was a child of the town, Hanna Pitkänen by name. They had sat in the same class at the elementary school for a year; perhaps she would take pity on her for that reason too.

There were people in the shop, Hanna was busy at the selling, and Mari stood aside to wait. Hanna talked cheerfully with the customers, measured out, gave the change, and slipped a sweet or a lump of sugar into the bargain for some of them. When the shop emptied at last, Mari got her chance to put her business.

Wasted trouble; nothing came of it. A refusal was what she got.

"Mari dear, I'd give it you gladly," said Hanna, "but I daren't, d'you see. Ask the mistress; maybe she'll allow it, and then I'll weigh it out and put it in the book."

"I don't rightly know your mistress even," said Mari.

"She's a fattish, big sort of body."

"And would a person get speech of her? So that she wouldn't take it ill."

"Not a bit of it. You just go straight in, right from the gateway and then in at the first door."

Mari went. She came into the yard; saw the stairs she was to climb, and the door, and the windows of the rooms. Her heart began to beat and her legs would not carry her forward. She stood a while by the wall and tried to grow calm. Then she forced herself to go the way Hanna had shown her. She wiped her feet carefully on the fir-twigs in front of the steps, walked slowly up and went in. A sort of passage it was, with a white runner on the floor. Again she had to wait a moment; she was so frightened that she scarcely dared breathe. And she was shaking badly. The blood beat in every vein of her, hammering as with a thousand hammers. How was she to say it? That she had not so much as thought of yet. She tried to think, but could get no beginning at all. The sweat of her distress came out on her forehead. In she must go all the same, come of it what might.

There were two doors off the passage. Trusting to luck she went up to one of them, took hold of the handle and opened it, very quietly and timidly. She came into a room with a piano in it, a table under the window, and some chairs. On both sides of the door there were outdoor clothes hanging on the wall. There was nobody to be seen or heard. All that strange property around her frightened her; it seemed to threaten her, and it was as if the whole room were sternly requiring her to leave. Mari was on the point of going back, when she noticed a door at the far end standing ajar. She gave a cough...

A soft footfall was heard; there appeared in the doorway a lady dressed in black, big and fat. This would be her. Mari began; she did not rightly know what she was saying, but the mistress seemed to have taken her meaning all the same, for she came nearer and began to look her over with searching eyes from head to heel. Mari tried to stammer out further that she would pay right enough, the mistress need not doubt it. But her jacket was very much out at the seams, and the mistress's eyes seemed to find every hole in it. And from these there must have come a different assurance about the payment, for the mistress's face darkened. In a firm, decided voice she said:

"It won't do for me to give credit. At this time every second person wants to buy on credit; the goods scatter all over the world and no money comes in to pay with. And then one gets into difficulties oneself."

"I would get it to you as sure as sure, ma'am. I'd never have come asking at all if I didn't know it for certain."

"Very likely you would. But I do not know you, and I have been deceived so often that I have learned by degrees to doubt. Besides —" the mistress drew herself up and took a few steps back towards the door, as a sign that she wished to end the conversation. "Besides, I do not care to give anybody credit on so quick-selling a commodity as flour. When the profit is exceedingly small, it does not pay to sell for anything but ready money."

Mari begged pardon for having come to trouble her, said good-bye and went away. Her back was more bent than usual as she went down the stairs. What had she tried for at all. She might have guessed it would go like that. She had only lost time for nothing; Anni was perhaps crying at home already.

(Span 2 ends. 2,758 words of English from 1,782 words of Finnish — an expansion factor of 1.55, against span 1's 1.50 and the 1886 Swedish translation's 1.34 over the whole novella.)

Span 3 — paragraphs 134–206 (the road to the bishop's; the ladies in the poor room)

She began to walk really fast; but at the gate she met a thin, wretched-looking poor woman carrying two children on her arms, while two more ran alongside. The children fretted in her lap; the poor mites were badly and awkwardly placed there. Mari felt sorry for the woman, who was plainly putting out the last of her strength.

"However do you manage to carry the two of them? Isn't it too heavy work?" she asked.

"What's to be done, when one must," the woman answered. "There'll be no mercy for it here, I suppose, though a body dropped down on the spot."

"Let the bigger one walk. He looks a sturdy boy enough."

"The poor creature has a trouble in his head, so that he can't bear to walk more than a little way at a time."

"Dear, dear! Well, come here then, and I'll carry you. Where are you bound for?"

"Yonder, I thought, to the bishop's. They're said to be good to the poor."

"Perhaps I'll see you there. It's a bit round about, and I ought to be getting home myself, but we'll go all the same. We'll try to step out a little quicker."

"Thank you kindly. It feels quite light now."

"Where do you come from?"

"From Karttula."

"Is your man living?"

"He's living; but he's had a bad leg on him going on two years now. And there'll be no good come of it now, when it has eaten it away down to the knee already, all shrunk and withered."

The water streamed out of the woman's eyes. She wiped her face with the corner of her kerchief.

"Have you no help from the commune?"

"Two pecks of grain a week they give the man for bread; for me nothing, and nothing for the children. You're young, they say, go to work. But Lord bless us, when there's no work to be had, not if a body begged for it on her knees. I didn't take to the beggar's road lightly; I tried rather to bear it and stop in the one place, in our drying-barn out there in the backwoods. And I put myself to bed of an evening with my children and the everyday hunger along with us. But when death itself began to come at last, then a body had to break out of the nest."

The child on her arm grew restless. The woman stopped, gave it the breast, and then walked on again in Mari's company. The bigger children, a boy and a girl, both of them in miserable rags, had run a good piece on ahead. The woman took fright; she called to them to wait. And not until she had come up with them did she grow easy again. She scolded them for all that, and warned them.

"It's a wonder you'll not mind what's said to you. What can I do for you, if you get lost, or somebody drives over you. Keep close now. You, Sere, take hold of my skirt."

Then she went on with what she had been saying to Mari:

"I've seen better days myself; such misery as this wasn't always to be borne. A while back there, when my man was earning three and four marks a day, we could eat well enough and get ourselves clothes. But the last rags of them are sold now and put into food this winter past. There was some lady or other down by the shore who gave this quilt to put round the child. There are good people in the world yet, sure enough. May God only give them strength to get another, so there'd be something to share with others besides, and not with me alone."

"Was your man left there in the barn by himself?"

"Quite by himself; that's what grieves me the worst of all. But there was no other way for us. The leg runs with such matter that it stinks like poison — who would take him into their house? I did try asking one and another to go out and keep him company, but there was no getting them."

"Here it is now, the bishop's house."

Mari set the boy down out of her arms.

"You can manage the yard now, I dare say," she said.

"A thousand thanks for your trouble. I never so much as asked your name."

"I'm one of the Holpainens."

"One of the Holpainens, is it. Well, thank you kindly once again."

"It's nothing."

They parted. Mari now stepped out quickly for home. The nearer she came, the tighter her chest grew. Had she the strength to go and look at that misery again, that sickness and nakedness and want on every side. It was just as if some power were forcing her rather to run right away. But the poor children! What would become of them. Hellu was there faithfully minding Anni; she would be a real brute indeed if she had the heart to leave them. Mari kept on the road to the end of it, and no longer felt even her hunger, nor how little strength was left in her.

From a long way off she saw Petu standing at the gate waiting for her, and guessed from that that all was not right. The boy was shivering with cold in his thin frock. Bare-headed he stood, and bare-legged; on his feet were the old broken shoes. Mari tried to hurry; she waved her hand for Petu to go inside, but the boy could not contain himself.

"Anni's dying," he cried.

"Lord bless us!"

The mother snatched the boy along with her and went at a run into the room. Both of them were crying there, Hellu and Anni — Hellu because she could not get Anni to leave off. The poor child had been screaming a long while; you could hear it in the voice, which did no more now than rasp a little. The mother took her up into her arms; burning hot she was again, the same as in the night, and her mouth fairly scorched against the breast. But she had cried herself to exhaustion, and the eyes fell shut in a moment. She got the child out of her arms into the cradle, asked Hellu to rock her again, and went to look for a bite for herself in the table cupboard. There was nothing in it but a couple of cold potatoes and Tiina Katri's crust of bread. She tried a mouthful of that all the same, for there was such a strange cramp under her heart. But, whatever it was, the piece would not go down her throat, not though she took a drink of water on top of it. And it wanted to come back up when she forced it down. That same minute the room began to sway before her eyes and her sight went dim. It would be for want of sleep, surely; she must lie down. She went staggering to the corner, to the bedclothes heaped where the bed had been, and asked the children to be quiet so that she might get a little nap. When she let herself down and pressed her eyes shut, it seemed to her just as if she had sunk deep into the bosom of the earth. If a body could only get away out of the world's troubles into peace and rest, she thought. But more than that she was not able to know, for she went into a strange state. She was neither waking nor sleeping, neither in a faint nor in her senses. She did not think and she did not feel, but strange sights came up before her. And though she tried to drive them off, for dimly she did understand them to be nonsense, they would not go, but grew and grew and began to torment her. Along with all this she heard, as if from far away, Hellu's voice, and that she knew to be real: knew that Hellu was singing to Anni.

The words came to her ears like this:

"Come, dear Jesus, come down hither, Gather us from earth away. Come, dear Jesus, come down hither, Take us all to heaven above."

The singing went further off and further. The voice was only faintly to be heard now; she could not make out the words at all. At last everything grew still; the shapes too melted away before her, and into peace and rest she sank...

Hellu rocked, and every little while warned the boys, who wanted to romp too hard. Not that it would have disturbed the mother; she slept so sound that one might surely have pulled the room down before she would have started out of it.

About half an hour must have gone by when the door opened and two ladies came in.

"Mother, mother!" cried Hellu.

But the mother did not wake. She left the cradle and ran to pull at her.

"Mother, there's ladies here. Get up!"

She shook and shook at the mother until she got her to lift her head.

"There's ladies here, mother, there's ladies here."

At last she seemed to take it in. She rubbed her eyes, wiped her forehead, called on God and tried to get herself sitting up. Then all at once it came to her that these must surely be the district inspectors; and now they had seen her lying down in the middle of the day. They would take her for a lazy woman, and would maybe give her no work. And the coffee pot, still out on the table! What would they make of that? That there was no want here after all, since there was still coffee to be drunk.

These thoughts went criss-crossing through Mari's mind like lightning. And she took such a fright that she began to talk all confused, and then took fright at that in its turn and grew more confused still.

"I lay down there a bit, when my man went to fetch those medicines, or that ticket, I haven't been lying long, but my head was so dreadfully bad, and we haven't had any coffee, it was only chicory that was put in the pot again today..."

She was in a panic, and made her case worse the longer she kept on talking. She noticed that herself at last, and then there was nothing left for her to do but burst out crying. Hellu's tears began to run down her cheeks too. They always came of themselves, the moment she saw the mother in trouble.

The ladies listened to Mari's talk, looked about them in the room, and fixed their eyes at last on the children. But Mari was wretched. She was afraid they would believe, on top of everything else, that she was drunk. And she tried again whether she could not put her thoughts more plainly now.

"This is the way it is in a poor man's home. There's no joy for anybody; it's pain and hunger a body has to bear from a child up. That eldest girl there has had her fill of the world's hardness already. From a little thing, nothing but sickness. One illness would leave her and the next would take her. But she goes on living all the same. Many a finer-blooming child has gone to the grave round about here; she alone can't get away, and she the weakest of them all. Don't cry, even, my poor thing — you'll lose the last of your eyesight."

Pity came into the ladies' faces; one of them patted Hellu on the head and took a copper out of her pocket, which she pressed into her hand.

Petu and Ville had been staring at the visitors all this time without a break. Ville stood quite close to them. The boy's eyes were wide open and his hands were in his trouser pockets. And he was as solemn as a fish. Petu went and gave him a tug from behind. But Ville was not to be moved; he only stood bolt upright and never turned his head. Petu tugged a second time. Not a bit of it. A third time, and so hard that the boy staggered a few steps forward and was near falling into the lady's skirts. Now he did let out a howl and came butting at him. Petu made off in a hurry, with his frock flying. The mother checked them and got hold of Ville. Petu got clear and could jeer at his ease:

"Aha, serves you right, aha, aha!" And at the end of it he put his tongue out as far as it would go.

"What's your name, girl?" asked the lady.

"I'm not a girl, though I have got a frock on."

The lady laughed.

"You'll have a name, though, I suppose?"

"Petu."

"So you're Petu, are you. Well, tomorrow I'll bring you a pair of trousers."

Well, that was to Petu's liking! His mouth went into a wide smile; he came flying straight over to the mother and buried his face in her lap.

The ladies gave Mari a ticket with which she might go for work; it would be given out twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, fifty pennies' worth each time. Mari thanked them from the bottom of her heart and followed them out into the passage. When she came back into the room that coffee pot vexed her still, and now, sure enough, she put it away out of sight. She set the room to rights all over again besides, and scolded the children the while, who had made a litter of it in her absence. It would not have mattered so much otherwise, but that the ladies had to come just at the worst of the mess. And she washed the boys' eyes.

"Great lumps of things, and not so much sense in them as to get themselves clean even; the mother has to be in every place at once."

That was how she scolded as she bustled about there. She could guess too what the ladies were saying to each other when they had left them.

"It was wretched enough in there, but the poor things have themselves to blame for a part of it. They might at least wash their children and keep things decent about them. Water costs nothing, when all's said."

That was the way she had often heard them talk when she was at the comptroller's; and what else were they to understand, who had never been in a poor person's case themselves. They did not know how little strength for work there is in a body whose mind is weighed on by everlasting care, and whose last powers hunger takes away.

That put her in mind that they had scarcely any food at all in the house for the day. Hellu must go out with her bag.

"But don't be long," she warned her, "and don't stand about in the kitchens; come away if they're not willing to give. Tie that woollen kerchief over your head, so your ears keep warm."

Mari herself sat down to keep the cradle going. She was worn out still, and Petu was idle enough there, but he could never keep patient, and nearly always got the child awake. So she tried rather to stay awake herself.

She sat on the stool, holding the edge of the cradle with her right hand; on the other she leaned her cheek, and set the elbow against her knee. A strange weight came on her, the eyes would go shut in spite of her, and her head nodded so that it fell off her hand time and again. Then the cradle would want to stop too; and the child would begin at once to twist her head about; but Mari would start up again and set it going harder, until Anni went off to sleep once more.

The sitting grew hard for her all the same; her back ached, and her sides, and there was no way in the world she could keep awake.

"Petu, come and rock her a little while, so I can lie down. There's a bit of rye-cake for you, but don't you let the child wake. Ville, you come beside me, then you'll be quiet for that while."

She was asleep the moment she threw herself down on the clothes, and did not wake, though Ville pressed her cheek with his finger and whispered:

"Mother, hi, mother, I don't want to lie down."

(Span 3 ends. 2,778 words of English from 1,795 words of Finnish — an expansion factor of 1.548, against span 1's 1.50 and span 2's 1.55. Three spans, 5,372 Finnish words, 8,235 English.)

Span 4 — paragraphs 207–295 (the neighbours, the railway wages, and the night)

Copy-text from this span onward: the 1886 Edlund first edition, collated against Gutenberg 13976 / Otava 1917 at every substantive divergence (D65, ../collation.md). Six renderings below follow the first edition against the text spans 1–3 were made from.

But all at once Anni burst out screaming at the top of her voice. In the same instant Mari started up and sat.

"Lord bless us, what's come over her?"

She rubbed her eyes and pushed the hair up off her forehead with both hands. Anni shrieked; Petu rocked and sang.

"Did you do anything to her?"

"No."

Do what she would, Mari could not get her to settle; Tiina Katri too heard the screaming on her own side of the house and came in to look.

"She's dying outright," she said, and took the child from Mari.

She swung her in her arms, tapped at the window and hushed her. All in vain.

"Have you offered her the breast?" she asked.

"She won't take it."

"Koponen's wife is over there on my side. Do call her in; maybe she'd know something for this one."

"We're done for now; and no sign of that Holpainen coming home either," Mari moaned as she went.

Petu too tried to soothe Anni; he hopped about in front of her, laughed, made a music with his mouth, knocked two blocks of wood together and got up to every trick he could.

"Be still; she takes no notice of that, whatever you do," said Tiina Katri.

Koponen's Lopo advised giving the child four or five drops of Hoffmann's and then swinging her in a quilt; that was how she had got her own boy to settle. Tiina Katri had some at home; she fetched the bottle and they poured the stated number into the child's mouth; it went down the wrong way and she was near choking on it. By swinging her in the quilt they got her at last, sure enough, to quiet down.

"Where has your bed got to?" asked Tiina Katri, whose eyes had gone many times already to the empty place where it had stood.

"The landlord took it for the rent."

"Oho!"

Tiina Katri said no more; but in her own mind she was sorry she had made such a to-do that morning over her bread. She was none the poorer for it, when all was said. And was it any wonder if the poor children took it — they must surely have been hungry. There was no sign of any dinner in the making here to-day either, and she with a good soup on the fire. She settled it with herself to bring the boys a little dishful, if only there were enough to spare; and why should there not be enough — she would eat a bit sparinger herself.

"It's a life, right enough, this life of the poor," Lopo broke out; "it's the last thing of all. Our old man can't get sleep into his eyes any more of a night either; he only lies awake and turns it over this way and that, what's to become of us. If a body could only get as far as the summer, maybe it would answer somehow again then."

"That's just it; only a body often doesn't know how to-morrow is to be got over," said Mari, who sat on the cradle with the child on her arm. "And then this constant worry and heaviness will so deaden the mind. I've not had a night's sleep this long while for this poor mite."

"God himself must know what he's about," said Tiina Katri, "but it sets a body thinking a long while sometimes, when the way of this world is so strange. One has more than enough and another pines away in want. There's no understanding him — what the dear Creator has ordered it so for."

"Many a thing must stay dark to us in this life," Mari sighed, more as if to her own thoughts, for she was looking at little Anni, who was making a thin complaint in her sleep.

"It hurts her there, poor thing," she went on. "Would it be stitches, or what?"

"Who's to know the ailments of a child that has no speech," said Lopo. "But she does look very ill in the face."

"That'll be Holpainen coming now, sure enough," said Mari, when somebody stamped his feet in the passage.

It was he, and Heiskanen with him, Tiina Katri's man.

"You have been a time," said Mari. "Did you get a ticket at least?"

Holpainen gave her a folded white scrap of paper. Mari opened it and looked at the writing inside; but as she could make nothing of it, she gave the ticket back to Holpainen.

"Put it in the crack of the wall for now," she said.

Tiina Katri and Lopo gave the men the chairs, and sat themselves down on the heap of clothes in the corner.

"So the railway work's beginning now," said Heiskanen, taking his pipe and tobacco-pouch out of his pocket. "Fill a pipe yourself too, Holpainen."

"So it's beginning already. Then a body may get to live again, God be thanked," said Lopo.

"Don't be too delighted before you hear what they pay in wages there," said Holpainen.

"Well?"

"No more than eighty pennies."

"Good God, what can they be thinking of. Eighty pennies — why, it's not enough for bread. What are the rents to be paid with then, what's the wood to be bought with and what the footwear. And that goes quicker in work of that sort than it does commonly."

"Yes, and there's a heartier need of food in it too. When a body's idle she eats half as much," said Tiina Katri.

"The gentry care no more for a poor person than for a dog, and hardly so much," said Lopo. "They might kill us outright at least; but they torment us in such a way that living is many times worse than dying."

Heiskanen blew a long puff of smoke out of his mouth.

"And where would the State itself get money for officials' salaries and the rest. It's with the sweat and strength of the poor they're paid, when all's said," he said.

"That's certain; with what else, indeed," Lopo said hotly. "And the gentry don't ask about it if many a one lays down his life; they know there'll be slaves enough left over for them, since there's poor people in plenty in the land. But I read them a sermon, that I did, when I went to pay the head-money. I said, will it be the collar off my frock you'll take next year, or the hem. Or do you think you'll get a penny of money, when you're wringing the very last of it out of me now. It so gnawed at my heart, having to sell my one good change of clothes for the sake of that head-money."

"Your man was on the Oulu railway then, was he?"

"He was that, and the children all on my hands the whole time. He's threatening to be off again now, saying he can't bear to see the children hungry."

"Won't they be meaning to raise the wages later on, then?" asked Mari.

"Hardly," Heiskanen answered. "What need have they to raise them; they'll get workpeople enough at eighty pennies too at this time of day. And I'm afraid the whole railway will be a plain loss to us, for all it makes out to be a help. Workpeople will begin pouring in here from every quarter on the strength of it, and wages will stop as low through the summer as they are now. Why should private men begin paying more than the State does."

"And they do say the farm-owners have been to the engineers about it just now, that on no account should the workpeople be given big wages," Holpainen was able to tell them.

"Christ help us," cried Lopo, "they're all of one side to keep us down. But let it be — their turn will come round yet once, and if it doesn't come in this life it'll come in the other. Let them do their worst out of spite, the vengeance will come."

"It will fairly be the finish of poor people, if there's no earning more than eighty pennies next summer either," said Tiina Katri. "Many a one with five or six children, and the rents on top of that, and the debts run up over the winter that ought to be paid. And then when a body has come to be so bare of clothes and everything that many have no more than the birds of the air. I truly don't understand how we're to live next winter."

"A body takes to stealing so as to get into the prison, or gets herself into the infirmary; the Crown will take care of her then, right enough," said Lopo.

"Lord bless us, such talk," said Mari, soothing the child, who was awake again in her lap.

"Well, and what else is there for it — or is it better to go and hang?"

"A body suffers on rather, and pines till she dies."

Mari laid the child on her stomach and patted her back; she seemed to get some rest from it for a while, but the swaddling-band was quite wet behind.

"Put something dry round her, good soul," said Tiina Katri.

"Where am I to get it, when there is none. She dirtied everything in the night, and I've not got them washed yet. Bring the quilt here, Petu. There, the child won't take cold now anyway."

She wrapped Anni inside the coverlet and let her lie in the same position on her arm.

"There's surely a griping in her, seeing she gets more rest that way on her belly," she said.

Heiskanen emptied his pipe and put it back in his pocket.

"Aren't we going yet?" he asked his wife.

"Yes — heavenly Father, to be sure, and here I've clean forgotten my soup that I left on the fire."

"And what are we to eat?" asked Holpainen when the visitors had gone.

"There's not a crumb of bread in the house. I sent Hellu out just now with her bag; we'll wait — she surely won't come back quite empty."

Holpainen scratched his head and threw himself on his back on the heap of clothes.

"You don't so much as ask where the bed has got to."

"I heard that from the landlord already."

"If he'd only wait for this month's rent, and not drive us out into the field. Quiet, Ville, Anni's asleep."

"Give bread, mother."

"Where am I to give it from — wait till Hellu comes. Petu's to go to the gate to meet her, and see if she's not coming yet."

Petu went, but came back soon and said that Hellu was not to be seen yet.

Ville began fretting again.

"I'm hungry, mother; listen, mother, I'm hungry."

"Go out into the yard a while with Petu. Fetch some pretty chips from the shed there, so you can play, and build houses and such. Go along now, and be good."

"I won't."

Ville was going to start crying aloud, but the father made a sound, and at that he stopped short as though he had been nailed.

Hellu did come home a while later, and there were bits of bread in the bag to serve for that day. Almost in the same moment Tiina Katri appeared at the door, carrying a dishful of steaming potato soup in her hands.

"I've brought a little for you too, as there was some over," she said.

"Goodness me, Holpainen, get up and eat. A many thousand thanks, Tiina Katri, you're always good to us. God, dear Father, reward you. Now you're in luck, boys; but don't stand so broad there — let Hellu get near too."

Holpainen sat down at the edge of the table; the boys settled themselves as close as ever they could and went at the dish with greedy eyes. Hellu reached in her spoon from the side.

"Go and eat yourself too; I'll rock her meanwhile," said Tiina Katri.

From behind the boys Mari put a few spoonfuls into her mouth. Sweet it was, the potatoes so mealy that they went to pieces; she could not remember the time when she had eaten such a soup. But she had not the heart to take much of it, so that there should be some left for the others — the poor boys especially were eating so greedily. She licked her spoon clean under and over and then laid it down.

"Was that all you ate?" asked Tiina Katri, when Mari came back to the cradle.

"Food doesn't relish with me just now, this time."

It was partly true, too; for though she had been sharply faint with hunger only a moment before, and though the soup did taste sweet, still her appetite went that same instant, when it came into her mind that there was not enough of it after all to fill the bellies of them all.

That afternoon Anni slept tolerably quietly. Mari got out to the doctor's and to the apothecary's; with the medicine bottle in her hand she came home again in a calmer mind. She hoped the child would get better sleep the coming night with the help of the medicine. Tiina Katri gave them a little tin lamp, which she called a skinflint, so that they need not sit in the pitch dark. There would not be oil in it for the whole night, if little Anni should chance to lie awake, but for some while at any rate.

It must have been somewhere about eight or nine; there was no knowing so exactly, for there was no clock. The mother made up the places, the children's in the old spot and their own in the corner where those makeshift bedclothes were. Hellu was rocking the child, and Ville had fallen asleep on his face by the stove; the mother took his trousers off him and lifted him onto the bed beside Petu. Then she let Hellu too go to her rest, and moved the cradle beside her own place. Holpainen already lay on the wall side with his back bowed; nothing was to be seen of him but the broad shoulders and the brownish hair at the back of his head.

Mari set the skinflint and the matches on the floor close by, put out the light and blessed herself. She kept the cradle going by its bow, lay on her back with one hand on her forehead, and stared at the window, where a little light showed dim. Soon the others were asleep; she could hear it by their even breathing. It was quiet all round her, and black, and her thoughts only hissed and criss-crossed in her head. It came into her mind again, that business of the boys stealing the bread in the morning. Who knew what sort of evil-doers they might grow up to be. That was likely how they had begun, when they were little, the ones sitting in the prison now. They too had been children once, and mothers had suckled them and tended them into an unhappy life; a grief to themselves and to others. If her own boys should come to be there yet, in irons. Lord God!

She saw before her that yellow-painted stone castle and the iron-grated windows of the upper storey, which showed over the wall to the high road. And from between them — great Creator, was it a foretelling, or what — she saw Petu's face plainly. Petu's face grown up, grey-pale and gloomy, but Petu's face! Was it a foretelling, or what? Lord bless us!

She said the "Our Father" and the "Lord's blessing", but shook from the crown of her head to her heel for all that. She could not remember a single hymn by heart, though she had known them well enough once. But "I, a poor sinful creature" — that she got called into her mind somehow, and pressing her hands hard together she stretched them towards the window and said the confession of sins from beginning to end. She felt herself a nothing and a wretched worm of the earth, that had not a grain of strength of its own nor any merit of its own of any kind, and that with its children and all its household would go helplessly to ruin and damnation, unless the Lord in his mercy should save them.

Span 5 — paragraphs 296–375 (the end of chapter I and the opening of chapter II: the night)

Translated from the 1886 first edition (V21) — the first span for which the copy-text was settled before a word was written. Twelve readings differ from the 1917 text spans 1–4 worked from; the eleven that were adjudicated against the page scan are applied in ../span-5-source.txt and logged at D84–D87.

Little Anni twisted about in the cradle. Mari broke off her prayer and set the cradle going again. And when the child sank away at it, she too pressed her eyes shut and made up her mind to sleep. What did she gain by tormenting herself with grief; better to leave everything safely in the Lord's keeping. Holpainen did the wiser thing, sleeping heavily there beside her. The burden was common to them both; if one of them could carry it calmly, then why not the other? and what use was all that excess of worry? A body must be content with her portion and take everything out of the heavenly Father's hand in a humble spirit.

But there it was, just there — in her heart she was for ever grumbling all the same, and would never learn to thank God for her evil days. Perhaps that was the very reason he had sent them all this poverty and misery, and perhaps her children too were only suffering on her account. Poor Hellu — a body knew well enough what sort of life was waiting for her too, a cripple and ailing as she was. Blind she would surely go into the bargain before long. And she would never grow into the kind of person that could keep the life in herself by her work. The poorhouse was what lay before poor Hellu; there she would pine out her days, to be shoved and knocked about by people with no mercy in them. The poor thing was so soft-natured that she would never learn to stand up for herself; the world would have her to trample and tread on as much as it liked.

Thinking of it, Mari moved the cradle more fiercely, and her eyes were wide open again and staring at the window, where a piece of starry sky now showed dim.

People were nothing but bad to the poor and the weak, even when they made a show of helping. Better they should take the life out of a body at one stroke, and not torment her in want and misfortune. But nobody took the poor man's side; every last one of them was ready to press him down and lay load upon load. She felt that so keenly, every time she thought of her children's future. Hardness they would meet with in the world, enough and to spare; there were no days of joy to be looked for by them. Little Anni there in the cradle — who could tell her fate beforehand. She might grow up handsome; a very angel of the Lord she was now at any rate, with her blue eyes and her white curls. But there, perhaps, was the worst danger of all. A handsome girl and a poor one soon came to evil ways. Men would tempt her, and once they had got her to fall, they would keep her like a dish-clout. And a bad woman of that kind was in a wretcheder state than any, all the same: hardly anybody could look at her without spitting. Hellu would be happier in her almshouse after that, and almost Petu too... Lord God, had they not done a great sin, bringing children into a life like this. Better for the poor creatures never to have been born, than to come here and meet the world's sorrows. What is not, feels no pain and sees no hunger.

Mari pressed her head again with her free hand. The thoughts had grown so heavy that they stiffened in there like a prop driven under something. She felt no pain, but a strange tightening in the brain, and along with it a dreadful restlessness. No clear thought would come any more; she had not the strength for it, though she would have wished it. She tried to pray.

"Do not cast me off, dear Father, have mercy, come to my help..."

But it felt as though God threw her away from before his face, down into the darkness...

Then some spirit of wickedness took hold of her to press her hard; it came as if from behind and threatened her — what was it wanting?

Little Anni, was it ... to smother ... and to throttle by the throat ... those others ... and then herself ... to jump into the ice-hole...

"Lord Christ, help me... Keep my reason for me..."

She seemed to be sinking down at the foot of the cross, and there she cried to the Lord for help. But more and more of those evil spirits came about her; they tore and dragged and mauled her, and she gripped both hands round the wood of the cross and cried out...

II.

"Mari, hey! listen, what ails you? What are you crying out for?"

Holpainen shook her and shook her, but when he could not get her awake he groped for the matches on the floor and struck a light. Mari's eyes were open; she was awake, then, though she was crying out. Holpainen lifted the lamp to look at her more closely.

"What ails you, eh!"

He shook her by the shoulders, and now at last Mari quieted. But she looked frightened, and her eyes went restlessly round and round.

"What were you crying out for?"

"Not loud, not loud," she whispered, "or they'll come back."

"Who will?"

"They — the same ones."

She looked fearfully back into the far end of the room, where the skinflint's dim light did not reach. Holpainen glanced at her uneasily; an evil foreboding would rise in his breast, but he tried to drive it off. So great a scourge as that God would surely not send them.

"You've been dreaming. What are you staring into that corner like that for; there's nobody there. Listen, Mari, come now, come out of it."

He shook her again. Mari seemed to grow calm.

"Are you ill?"

"No. Why?"

"Because you're wet through."

Holpainen stroked her face with his rough hand.

"Just as if you'd been dipped in the water. Was it a dream you had, that you cried out so?"

"A dream, I suppose."

Mari shuddered, remembering it.

"We'll lie down and sleep in the Lord's peace."

Holpainen was going to put out the light, but Mari stopped him.

"No, let it burn, I'm so frightened."

"Let it burn, then."

Holpainen pushed the skinflint further off along the floor and stretched himself out, ready to go on with his sleep directly.

"Good luck it was no worse," he thought, and drew the coverlet over him.

Mari huddled in behind his back and pressed her forehead against the man's shoulders.

"If a body could get a little sleep," she reasoned to herself, "before those dreadful sights come again."

She had not been asleep; that she knew for certain. She had seen them all quite plainly, whether it had been raving then or something worse still. If only she were not going to lose her reason. So strangely heavy and stiff it felt in her head. And the black, dreadful thoughts would force their way into her mind again. God did not love all people alike — only the high and the rich, but not the poor. Pain and anguish, hardship and misery of every kind he sent them; he pressed them under so heavy a yoke that they perished under it. The weaker broke; those who had more appetite for life threw themselves into vice, and so their misery in time brought them everlasting damnation on top of it. The high and the rich had no need to carry a grieving mind about their children's future; seldom if ever did wrongdoers come of them, and they did not end in the prison, nor on the poor relief, nor in the bawdy-houses.

So it was: God cared nothing for the poor man, but had cast them off and left them in the power of the evil spirits...

At this her mind went astray again; she seemed to see enemies lying in wait, watching their chance to fall upon her. She wanted to cry out, but behind all this confusion and fear she had the knowledge now, for all that, that by crying out she would wake the others, who were sleeping peacefully. So she only thrust her fist at them and tried to huddle closer still against Holpainen's back. And she forced herself to be silent, and did not cry out. But it was hard: the heart beat and every vein beat and the body was flung this way and that, was crammed and pounded. She breathed in gasps, held fast with one hand to Holpainen's shirt, and with the other she beat the air without stopping, to frighten away those lurkers behind her, who came nearer the moment she left off threatening them the least little bit.

Holpainen stretched himself and pushed her away from him.

"Get away further off, will you, I've no room."

Mari struck him back. Holpainen sprang up sitting and stared at her without a word. Mari stared back; a black fire burned in her eyes; her hair had fallen down over her forehead, and her face looked strange. Holpainen went on looking at her. That dreadful foreboding made the hair rise on his skin.

"What did you strike me for?"

Mari pressed her lips together and said nothing. Some force drove her to fall on him again, but she held herself in.

"What did you strike me for? Mari, listen, you are awake, aren't you?"

"I am."

Holpainen's speech quieted her. Her sense of herself came back; she understood that she was out of her mind. But that she would not let her man know; she would keep it hidden, hidden as long as ever she could.

"So you are awake? What are you beating me for, then?"

"I had a bad dream. Lie down, I'll not strike any more."

"Are you ill?"

"I'm not. It's bad dreams I see."

"Bless yourself, good soul."

Holpainen let himself down beside her, but turned now on his other side, so as to keep a watch on her.

Mari folded her hands and prayed the "Our Father" and the "Lord's blessing" half aloud. Holpainen heard her say both of them right, word for word. Would a person out of her wits be able to do that, he thought. Sleep had been driven from his eyes; he watched his wife, who seemed very restless. She made sudden movements without stopping, plucked at the coverlet with her fingers and turned her head this way and that, as though she were listening for something. Her breathing was uneven and panting. Her body shook.

"You'll be fretting so about how we're placed?"

Mari did not answer. She made up her mind to keep silent, so that Holpainen should notice nothing, for she would surely talk wildly if she once opened her mouth. Off there they fled, further away, those lurking spirits. Yah, serve you right — they were afraid of her man, then, for all that. She had a mind to jeer at them and tease them a little, but before Holpainen she did not dare, for that was madness. She knew it was madness, though she saw them so plainly; there they were, further off now, with their backs to the two of them, only watching in secret and glancing over their shoulders; a good thing they were afraid of her man.

"Don't you let worldly matters weigh on your mind so; it does harm, and they'll be none the better for it anyway. A man must be patient and put his trust in God; he'll take care of us, sure enough."

Holpainen wondered to himself that he could speak so well; the words came into his mouth as if of themselves.

"Yes, yes, God will take care of us."

Mari knitted her forehead and pressed her lips together. The stupid blockhead, to believe that God cared about the meaner sort of people. Did he not see plainly how, on the contrary, he hated them and sent every misfortune, every sickness and every cross to poor people, and then last of all those wicked spirits upon them.

"Can't you get to sleep? Shut your eyes; perhaps you'll sleep then."

Mari shut her eyes. She had to obey, for the man was looking at her so gravely. She would have liked to strike him, but she did not dare; he was so strong, and he would have hold of her in a moment with that solid fist of his. Keep still ... keep still ... but once he was asleep, Holpainen, then she would fly at his throat with her nails. Once he was asleep... Mari opened her eyes a crack, but shut them again at once when she met her man's quiet, searching look. Keep still ... keep still...

Keep still ... keep still...

And keep the eyes shut. Holpainen was awake; she heard it from his breathing. And little Anni was sleeping so well tonight — was the poor child beginning to mend, then?

Ville was kicking; he had got the cover off himself, likely, lying there on the cold floor. She could not get to putting it right; Holpainen was looking at her, she felt that in her bones, though she had not the strength to open her eyes a crack any more.

Keep still ... keep still...

At that Mari's imaginings sank away little by little; she slept.

Holpainen could get no more sleep; it must have been getting on for morning by then. Still, he lay stretching himself out on the bedding and turning things over. All was not right with Mari now; that he understood well enough. But perhaps it would pass off, when she had got a little sleep. A weak creature might soon go astray from sheer overtiredness, especially after being many a day without food. And Mari always took the smallest share for herself when she shared out the crumbs of food among them, though by rights she ought to have eaten half as much again as the others, having a child at the breast. It was bad that he had not thought of it before. Then she had sat up many nights with Anni besides; that took strength too. A good thing she was sleeping now in her cradle without rocking, so Mari could rest ... so that, so that Mari could rest...

Why, Mari had not eaten that soup at dinner either; she only put the spoon in a couple of times. If tomorrow he could get her something from somewhere ... if he had the face to ask Tiina Katri ... she would do it, surely, and he would tell her how badly he had been frightened this night; then Tiina Katri would help them right enough...

Here Holpainen's thoughts stopped, for little Anni was beginning to wake. He tried to get up as quietly as ever he could, so that Mari should not start awake, and stepped carefully over her onto the floor and across to the cradle.

Anni's eyes were shut, but she was twisting about and whimpering in pain. Holpainen rocked her and tried to sing, the way Hellu or Mari did, but he could not get his voice to bend to it; nothing came of it but a rough growling. Anni seemed to find it strange; she tore her eyes open and looked in wonder at the one who was rocking her. When she saw her father there, where her mother had been before, or Hellu, her mouth went awry and the whimpering turned into crying.

Mari started up and stared at them with round, motionless eyes; plainly she was not in her senses yet.

"Could you get up and give her the breast, or shall I bring her over beside you?" Holpainen asked.

Mari said nothing, but as if by old accustomed habit she came over to them, and bending across the cradle she put the breast into the child's mouth. Two or three times she drew at it, then twisted her head away and would have no more. Pain and distress came into her face; the whimpering voice was weak and hoarse.

"Oughtn't she to be given the physic?" Holpainen asked again.

Mari seemed to understand what he said, though she answered nothing; she only got up quietly and gave the child the prescribed drops out of a spoon into her mouth. Holpainen followed her closely with his eyes and tried to assure himself that there was nothing the matter with Mari but tiredness. A strange oppression tormented him all the same, and he could not get free of the fear. When the time had gone by and Tiina Katri was up, he thought to himself, then he would hear what she made of it.

Holpainen threw himself down on the bed again, not to sleep, but to wait for the morning to come. The elder children were still lying in a sound sleep on the other side of the room. Mari rocked away faithfully, evenly and quietly, just as before. Only her clothes hung about her in disorder and her hair fell down over her eyes without her caring to wipe it away. And just now, when she had been fetching the physic bottle, she had walked, to Holpainen's mind, bent forward, dragging her feet after her. But all that might be nothing but tiredness — as most certainly it was.

In this way he tried to press down the anguished feeling that pressed in his breast. But he did not succeed in it until later in the day, when Tiina Katri, at his asking, had been in to look at Mari. Holpainen went out after her into the passage, and there the two of them talked the matter over in whispers.

Span 6 — paragraphs 376–441 (chapter II, the day Anni dies and Mari's mind goes)

"There's nothing wrong with her that I can see," said Tiina Katri. "Grief and worry always change a person, and then perhaps she's afraid now besides that Anni is dying. A mercy it would be for the poor child too; but there, a body wouldn't willingly give them up for all that."

"But when I couldn't get her to speak last night — that was what frightened me worst."

"Worn clean through, I dare say she was. Sparing of words she seems to be still, but she answered, at any rate."

"You don't think, then, there's anything bad to be feared?"

"No."

"God be thanked. It's for all the world as if a heavy stone had been lifted off my shoulders."

"Go in now, or she'll begin to wonder what we're whispering about out here. I'll come and look at her again in the afternoon."

"Thank you kindly, Tiina Katri, and come soon and comfort us poor folk again."

"Yes, yes."

Tiina Katri wondered, as she went, what had so changed Holpainen. Hard-natured he had looked before, and steady; but now he, that burly, powerful man, was frightened like a little child.

Mari sat the whole day almost without moving beside the cradle. Anni weakened and weakened, had not the strength to cry any more and would not take the breast, though her mouth was quite dry. Hellu set the beds to rights and swept the floor. The boys sat in the corner by the stove eating bits of bread that were still in Hellu's bag from yesterday. Mari saw everything that happened round her as if from behind some distant dream. Nothing worked upon her, and she could take no part in anything, could not lay hold of anything. Her hand rocked the cradle quietly, not by her will, but out of the old accustomed habit. The boys quarrelled every now and again; she could not forbid them, her mouth was just as if it were nailed, lips and teeth together and the tongue thick inside there. Her soul was outside her body — so it felt to her; she was not living any longer and was not in that room, and yet she knew that she was living, knew that she was just where she was, knew that that was her man and that those children were her children. She understood this too, that the man was watching her uneasily and grieving, because she was not as she had been. Everything was dim in her eyes and yet she saw; there was a rushing in her ears and yet she made out their voices. She wanted nothing and hoped for nothing. If all the treasures of the world had lain there before her, she would have looked at them and not cared. But in going over the night's visions there woke in her, even so, some hope still, the last in this life. Into the bosom of the earth she would have gone, deep under the mould into everlasting rest. Nor did it grieve her, what might be waiting on the other side of the grave, for worse could not come than the night's sufferings had been. This state too, this soulless sort of living, this staggering in a dream or a swoon, was hard past bearing; gladly would she have changed even that for any other whatever — not for those horrifying sights, however. If she knew those were coming, she would go into the ice-hole before that.

Poor Hellu looked at her every little while, wondering, no doubt, at her not speaking. And what would she have to say? Nothing, nothing at all. Coffee, if she could have made it; there were grounds still in the pot, but they had been boiled twice already, what taste would come out of them now. Let her go begging, and get bits of bread and herring-heads and cold potatoes; strange that Holpainen had not thought to bid her. She could not do it, when her mouth had dried shut and her soul was gone.

But Hellu understood it of herself.

"Mother, listen, shall I go into the town again and ask for bread?"

Mari nodded her head. Poor child, if you would go away for ever and not see this misery, she thought, but she could not get it said.

Little Anni looked at her piteously, like one who begs for help and does not know how to complain of her hurts. She felt the feet and the hands; they were cold as death. Mari left off rocking, leaned her cheek on her left hand and her elbow on her knee. There she sat and looked, while little Anni lay a-dying.

Holpainen noticed there was something out of the way with the child, and came nearer. He stood on the other side of the cradle and watched how that little breast heaved labouring through its last pains. The man's rough face worked; a couple of tears started out of his eyes to the sides of his nose, but he wiped them away with his broad thumb and went back to sit at the end of the table. All day long he sucked at the empty stub of his pipe; there was no tobacco, but a little tang of it came out of it all the same, and the mere sucking was a pleasure besides.

By dinner-time Hellu was not home yet. But out of her bag she had left on the table a few cold potatoes and a heel of bread the mice had been at. Holpainen found salt in the cupboard, which he put into water. Quietly he beckoned the boys to come to their food, and Mari too; but she shook her head and stayed sitting in her old place. Ville and Petu, on the other hand, fell to on the potatoes readily enough, and their father divided them out evenly among them all, four apiece; for himself he took the ones he judged to be bad.

"Don't eat your potatoes yet, before you get bread," Holpainen whispered. "If you'd try a bite too, Mari, so as to get some strength — this looks to be good. Will you have some? I'll bring it."

No answer; only a small, sharp jerk of the head.

"There, boys, dip it in the salt water." Petu and Ville ate greedily, but their father had no real stomach for it. He swallowed with difficulty a few times, then left it. And out of the cradle came moanings more piteous than ever. They went through Holpainen's heart like a knife. He hoped the end would come soon for the child's pains.

Mari sat bowed as before and looked at the child, whose eyes stared stiffly at one point. She wondered to herself that she could watch the child's pains so indifferently, as if they did not touch her at all. Could she have suffered already to such a degree that no grief worked upon her any more. Coldly, at this moment, she could have watched the whole of them wrestling with death. Why, the hardest pains of a few hours were nothing beside the sufferings of a long and toilsome life. Better they should all die now at one stroke, and be made blessed. Here her head swam again, and some power wanted to drive her upon the children, to make an end of the days of life for those she had given them to. But when she raised her head and threw a dark look at the man from under her hair, she had to give the notion up, for she met grave and watching eyes. In the same moment she sank back again into her old dullness, saw everything that happened and did not see, heard and did not hear, suffered and did not suffer, lived as in a stupor and cared nothing for anything.

Hellu came home; a full bag hung in one hand, with the other she reached for the key to pull the door to.

"I got bones for the pot," she rejoiced.

"Hush, hush," her father whispered, and pointed to the cradle.

Hellu was frightened; it was as if an icy stream had run down the length of her body to her feet. She set her bag down in the corner and came on tiptoe to Anni. One look and no more, and she understood everything. Little Anni did not cry any longer and did not laugh, did not need their help any longer. Stiffly and slowly she moaned in the bottom of the cradle and looked at the ceiling without blinking her eyes, just as if she were waiting for the one who comes to fetch.

Hellu crept to the heap of clothes in the corner and threw herself down on her face. From the shaking of her body it could be seen that she was crying, though no sobs were heard.

Holpainen sat bowed, his head down, almost level with his knees. His hands were crossed on his forehead. He tried to pray, but could not; thought had stopped. So he only waited quietly, waited for that deciding moment to come. He scarcely breathed; the heavy and solemn presence of death held down and pressed down all the life in the room.

The boys too sat quiet now, in one place. Ville watched with round eyes, now his mother, now the cradle. There were crumbs still at the corner of his mouth from the eating, and the hard heel of bread had rubbed his cheek red. Petu held on with both hands to his own bare foot and wondered that the lady had not brought him his trousers yet, though she had promised so certainly yesterday.

And Mari was like a picture, without movement, without voice and without life.

Anni breathed more slowly, then rattled once or twice in her chest, and there it all ended.

For a while Hellu waited, whether anything more would be heard; but when everything stayed in the stillness, she understood that Anni was no longer. And though she had prayed that the Lord would come and take them out of the world, it felt so hard now, all the same, when Anni had gone, that her heart was like to break. She cried aloud, and then Ville began to cry too.

Tiina Katri heard the crying on her own side and came to look.

"So that's the way of it," she said quietly, "it's settled here already, I see. Quick work it was, too. Yes, yes, poor Mari, the Lord gave, the Lord took, blessed be the name of the Lord."

Mari sat still in the same place and in the same posture.

Tiina Katri pressed the eyelids of the body shut and tied a kerchief under the chin.

"Go and lie down a while, Mari; I'll wash little Anni, and then I suppose she must be got out of the warm room."

"And I must set about making the coffin," said Holpainen.

Mari, who had not uttered a word until now, broke out suddenly into speech, hurried and abrupt.

"A blue coffin and a white cover, of shirting it must be, and a flower in her hand. Get money from somewhere, Holpainen."

"Yes, yes."

Holpainen was so glad to hear Mari speaking that he would have promised to fetch the moon down out of the sky, if it came to that.

"And she's not to be put in the common grave, but in a separate one, quite separate. Do you hear, not together with the others."

"No, no, don't you fear."

"And a fringe of myrtle sprigs is to be made for her head and a flower for her hand, the kind that costs a mark, and a shirting shift. Yes, do you hear, a shirting shift and a flower, in her hand, and a fringe..."

Tiina Katri and Holpainen looked at one another. That sudden flood of talk made the man uneasy again.

But Tiina Katri said quietly:

"Lie down there on the heap of clothes, Mari, and try to sleep. You're worn clean through. Here now, I'll make you something for under your head. There, get down to it."

"Aren't you going yet, Holpainen, to make that coffin, that coffin, that coffin..."

"Don't talk any more, it tires you. Holpainen will make the coffin right enough and we'll see to everything, the shifts and the covers and the flowers... only be easy now. Press your eyes shut, and you'll get to sleep the sooner."

Mari pressed her eyes shut, but her lips went on moving. The others could not make out the words, however; they tried to keep quiet. Tiina Katri washed the body and fetched a clean shift from her own side to put on it.

Mari had grown quiet, but they did not know for certain whether she was asleep or not. When, an hour or so later, she and Holpainen carried the body out on a board, Tiina Katri looked back and saw Mari's eyes wide open and following them. In them there burned a dark, threatening fire.

Tiina Katri hurried back the moment they had got the body into the storehouse. Holpainen meant to stay standing about, but Tiina Katri gave him a pull.

"Come away," she whispered.

They were not yet on the steps when a strange sound came from inside, and at the same moment all three of the children came bursting out of the door against them.

"Mother, mother..."

More than that Hellu could not get said. Holpainen's hair rose up on his head; he stepped past them into the room.

"Lord God!" Tiina Katri sighed quietly, stopping a moment and catching at her heart.

"Go, children dear, over to the house side; go and stay there. Say that I sent you."

She pushed them gently down the steps and turned back herself. The voice had turned into a scream. Bellowing it was, deep and rough, not the complaint of a human being and not the howling of a beast, but both together, and something else besides, ghastly and terrible. It was like a shrieking out of a distant, unknown world, where spirits writhe in the fire of their torments.

There she still was, stretched out on the bed — no longer that quiet and patient woman of before, but a raging, bellowing madwoman. Holpainen was holding her fast with both hands.

"The parson, the parson!" he shouted, the moment Tiina Katri appeared at the door.

"And the doctor," rang after her into the passage.

Tiina Katri ran. First to the parson, then to the doctor. And both of them answered her hurried asking at once.

The pastor, however, got there first. But there was no help in him. The sick woman screamed twice as terribly at the sight of him, and did not listen to his words at all. Besides that, she threshed about so that Holpainen had hard work to hold her.

"I can do nothing here," said the pastor helplessly, "but let us wait for the doctor. There he comes now."

Span 7 — paragraphs 442–572 (the doctor, the pastor–doctor argument, Harjula, and the end)

Doctor Wialén came in, grave and composed. At the first glance he took in how the matter stood. He turned to Tiina Katri, who stood trembling behind them by the stove.

"Get a couple of bands in here, or something of that sort."

Tiina Katri guessed his meaning. She looked about her and found Anni's swaddling-bands. These she gave him, and the doctor tied Mari's feet together with the one and her hands behind her back with the other. And then she was pressed down again onto the heap of clothes in the corner.

The doctor's eye went over the table and the window-frame.

"Ink and a pen?"

There were none; Tiina Katri ran to fetch them from the house side.

The doctor avoided Holpainen's questioning eyes and looked out of the window.

"Kan hon botas?" asked the pastor, but got no answer.

Heikura brought paper himself, and the ink-bottle and the pen with it, and set them on the table. They were all of them silent the while the doctor wrote.

"You'll give her a tablespoonful of this every second hour," said the doctor, holding out the slip of paper to Holpainen.

"Well," said the pastor, taking up his hat, "there's like to be nothing more for us to do here."

"Your pardon," Heikura broke out, "I'd ask — would there be any hope here of her mending?"

He looked at the doctor.

"How so?"

"It's like to be difficult. Seeing I've other tenants besides. They'll not take to listening to that."

They were all silent a moment. The pastor and the doctor exchanged a few words in Swedish. Then the former asked:

"Will you take your wife out to Harjula, Holpainen?"

"Would they take her in there?"

"I think they would. I'll write a paper for you to take to the chairman of the poor-relief board."

"Perhaps I had better do it. Holpainen can't get away from here at all now," said Tiina Katri.

It was given to her. Then the doctor and the pastor went away together.

"No hope, then?" asked the pastor when they were at the gate.

"None," the doctor answered shortly.

They walked side by side along the edge of the street; their way was the same. After a little the pastor spoke again:

"I've not lately seen such misery as that."

"There's plenty of it in the world."

"There is, there is. Sickness and disease, wretchedness of every kind. And the worst of it, that it can't be helped."

"It could be, perhaps, if there were the will to it."

"In what way? Explain that, doctor, come."

"Riches away, and poverty. Work and food for all — there's the first condition."

"Easily said. And then?"

"Better care of the health. The bad cases and the incurable put out of life quickly, and without pain."

"The Lord preserve us! In that last, at any rate, you'd be going about to alter God's providences."

"No more in that than in anything else where man strives to make himself master of nature."

"No, no, doctor—"

The pastor shook his head.

"When a beast is lingering in pain and torment, and you know it can never mend again, what do you do then?"

"But that's another matter altogether."

"Why so? Doesn't the same feeling of pity require that a human being's sufferings be ended too?"

"We can't know to what purpose God sends them to a man."

"By that reckoning it would be wrong to cure the sick at all, if once we start from this, that diseases come by a particular decree of God. And to be more consistent still, the care of the public health is perhaps a sin already, since by it we hinder God and make it harder for Him to send diseases."

"Let that matter be how it will, but at the least we've no right to go and put an end to the day of grace for anybody."

"If you preached that when wars are declared, I should be of one mind with you. But that you don't do. By the good old custom it's permitted then to kill and mangle healthy, powerful men by the drove, and nobody's conscience is troubled about it. There's the effrontery besides to pray God's blessing upon 'the arms,' and perhaps at the same time the people are warned to love their neighbour as themselves. It isn't considered that he too is a neighbour, the man they're going out to kill."

"Wars are God's scourges. We can't avoid them. God governs the world in this way, that He lets evil punish itself."

"No, my good pastor, you have an altogether false conception of God. Be assured of this, that men won't be sinning against God if wars are done away with in the world. But to come back to that unhappy woman — I assure you the day of grace is of no use whatever to her, for when the spark of reason is put out, there has gone from the soul the power of examining what is good and what is evil, and so it becomes impossible for her to repent."

"But her sufferings may be a lesson and a warning to others."

"If a man can get the blessedness of his soul in no other way than through another human being's suffering, then let him go to hell instead. Your pardon, pastor, but this is my religion. And it won't go into my head that God should have made that poor woman mad in order to save by it, perhaps, her burly husband's soul. He'd then be nothing but a — No, no, pastor, purge your religion; that doctrine won't do any longer for the people of the present day. And good-bye now; I've to look in at this house too."

He went in at the gate, and the pastor went on his way alone, thoughtful and grave.

At six in the evening Tiina Katri came back from the chairman of the poor-relief board with the order of admission in her hand. Holpainen was standing then in the yard, talking with Heiskanen. He had let Mari loose out of the bands, she having begged him for it so earnestly and promised to be quiet. And so meek she had been afterwards that Holpainen ventured to leave her alone while he stepped out a moment. For a while the three of them stood there considering whether it were best to set off with her to Harjula that same evening, or leave it till the morning.

"But what better does it make it," said Heiskanen; "taken she must be, whatever way. You'll have a hard night of it if she gets restless."

"And the children are frightened," Tiina Katri added.

"That's how it is, I dare say," said Holpainen. "Let's go and look at her again."

When they came in, Mari was nowhere to be seen. They looked about them in astonishment, until Tiina Katri noticed that the clothes were humped up on the cornerward side of the heap. Holpainen began pulling them apart, and there they found her, undermost, hunched on the floor. She trembled and looked at them with round eyes.

"Mustn't come, mustn't come, away, away, mustn't come, mustn't come..." she whined in a complaining voice.

"Don't be afraid, we'll do you no harm," said Holpainen, trying to get her out.

"Away, away, away..."

"Mari's coming for a little walk with us," said Heiskanen; "we're going to look at the town."

"Yes, and we'll smooth your hair first and set those skirts to rights," Tiina Katri coaxed; "I'm coming too."

"Don't, don't, I'm not coming, not coming, no, no, away, away.—Away!" The last word she snapped out in a loud voice.

"Quiet, quiet," Holpainen warned her, "or we'll tie your hands again."

"Mustn't tie, I'll be quiet, indeed I will. Quiet, quiet..."

She let Tiina Katri tidy her now and put her to rights. Then Holpainen took her under the one arm and Heiskanen under the other. So they set off to take her to Harjula, the poor people's institution, which lay about a verst outside the town. The men went in front. Tiina Katri walked close behind. Mari muttered to them the whole way in a low, uneasy voice.

"Oh, oh, oh, what harm have I done you, that you torment me so, oh, oh, oh, have mercy on me, unhappy that I am, oh, oh."

They only drew her along with them and answered nothing. If she began to make a louder noise, Holpainen warned her.

"Now then, remember we've the bands with us."

Then Mari at once dropped her voice again, almost to a whisper.

People came towards them, some on foot, some driving. All of them looked at them long and strangely. A few stopped out of curiosity.

"What ails her? Is she being taken to the madhouse, or where?"

"And what do you do with the knowing of it," Tiina Katri answered them.

They went their way; the people followed them a little while with their eyes and then turned to go on with their own.

The yard at Harjula was reached at last. Tiina Katri went in to show the order.

The keeper scratched behind his ear.

"Trouble enough there is with the ones in their senses, and mad ones over and above. Six there are already from before. Is this one right raving?"

"She is that; hard at it too, every other turn."

"There's no doing with them.—Where's she to be put now?"

He looked round at the wife, who was sitting in the same room.

"The children's building, I should think. The box is standing empty there since Eeva."

To the left of the gate was a small building containing two rooms, in which the old women of the almshouse and all the smaller children lived. Of the first there were about ten, of the latter close on twenty. In the corner of the first room was a dark box made of boards, for the insane. This Mari got for her place, since it happened to be standing empty now.

A hot, foul air came reeking against them the moment the door was opened. Tiina Katri was near choking; she put the corner of her apron in many folds before her mouth and nostrils.

The children were crying and fretting.

"Will you be quiet, you whelps!" one of the women shouted in a shrill voice.

The bigger ones left off and stayed looking at the newcomers; but the smaller ones went on whimpering. In the front room some of the women were spinning wool and others carding. The door stood open into the second room on the right; there five cradles were being rocked at once. The children squalled and the rockers sang, if such a one-noted droning could be called singing. Every now and then they struck the head of the cradle with the flat of the hand.

"The bogey's coming, the bogey's coming, will you be quiet."

Rags and bands the children had wetted hung along lines in both rooms. From these there spread a strong smell, which added more and more to the foulness of the air.

Mari grew restless the moment she had stepped over the threshold.

"Away, away, away, I won't, I won't, away, away, away..." she whined.

The keeper opened the door of the box. A black dark gaped at them.

"Put her in there!" said the keeper.

"Not I, not I, no, no, no..."

shouted Mari. But she was inside already, and the door was pushed to and locked.

Fearfully she beat against the wall and screamed. Screamed again in that same strange voice, which was not the complaint of a human being and not the howling of a beast, but both together.

"Aha," said the old women to the children, "you hear now — didn't the bogey come!"

The children pressed their heads aside and shut their eyes. And the rockers had no need to sing any more; they were so quiet that they hardly breathed.

Those women too who were spinning and carding left off their talk. They all stayed listening to that one voice, which filled both rooms and carried far out over the grounds, and in which it was as if the whole pain of nature were struggling out into the open.

Tiina Katri was the first out into the yard. The bad air of the rooms forced its way through the cloth into her mouth and nostrils; it pricked and smarted in her throat, she was near choking. Beside the steps she had to stop and be sick. Everything she may have eaten that day came up, and green bile at the last. The water ran from her eyes in a flood down her cheeks. She lay against the handrail of the steps on her breast and moaned.

One of the almshouse women stood by and laughed.

"So it's the smell that's turned your stomach so, ha, ha, ha. It's only from the strangeness; you know nothing about it once you're used to it. You should have come in the time of the last mad one, that did his good, his bad, under him — then you'd have known what a stench was! It heaved me too now and then, and chiefly when the box was being cleaned out, though I'm none of the squeamishest by nature else."

"The Lord bless us, a body would die of this outright," muttered Tiina Katri, when she came a little easier.

"Come away, there, what's the use of you," said Heiskanen, who was going towards the gate with Holpainen. Tiina Katri caught them up.

"And what do they keep people in such a reek for," she scolded. "Gather all the old wives and the little children into the one place, and the mad ones' box on top of it. They might give the poor creatures clean air at least; it's not likely to be anything grand there in the way of food either, seeing they look so thin and pale."

"Salt fish they get only of a Sunday, once in the week, so it's said."

"Unlucky is the one that comes to that."

"If a body could but die in good time, and not live to be old, and not come to lingering."

"A wonder they don't go to the rope sooner than to a torment like that."

They walked in front, Tiina Katri and Heiskanen, Holpainen a good way behind, his head down and his shoulders bowed. So heavily he trod the ground as he walked that one would have thought he was carrying a hard load on his back. A worn homespun jacket, greyish-brown, hung upon him; his trousers were torn behind.

Empty and bleak Holpainen's room felt the next day; two souls had gone from it at once, the mother and little Anni. Hellu was afraid of the storehouse, where little Anni's body was; she made a long round every time she went past it to the shed for wood. And if she had to go out in the dark, she shook like a skein of yarn.

The corner too she dreaded, where the mother had screamed so pitifully. In the dusk they sat with the boys always by the stove, and she did not dare then to turn her head that way, nor towards the cradle either, where little Anni had died. She spoke lower than before; it seemed hard to get any voice, and if she did get it, it rang strange to her and she did not want to know it for her own. The mother was in her mind without ceasing; she remembered so clearly how she looked when she sat with Anni in her lap and said something to them in her quiet voice. And she could not understand how they were to get on without the mother, who would see to clothes for them and the other things they needed. And that too was so strange, being alone whole days together, at their own hand, nobody advising, nobody bidding, nobody forbidding, from morning till night free to be and to live just as they liked. The boys romped and fought as much as they pleased; if Hellu tried to hinder them they did not mind her. Nor for this either, if she threatened to tell their father, for they knew she would not do it at any rate.

Sometimes Hellu longed so for the mother and for Anni and for the old times that the water forced its way into her eyes. But the mother had always warned her against crying, for fear the last of her sight should go. So she wiped the tears away at once, the moment they came out, and drank water to get the bitter lump in her throat to go down. All the same she knew there would never be a glad hour in their home unless the mother came back well. But if that should happen, then she would be as if in heaven and would not care though she went hungry and whatever came, though she went stone blind.

Ville did not grieve, nor Petu much either, though he was now and then as if in his thoughts. The lady had brought him trousers, and he lamented over it several times that the mother had not seen them. They had velvet on the legs and shiny buttons. At first they were always wanting to fall down, since he had no braces, but Hellu found an end of cord in the yard, and when they were tied fast with that at the waist, then they stayed up.

Tiina Katri looked in on them every day. When she had a wash she took their clothes into it too. And when Hellu happened to get soup-bones from the town, she broke them up and helped them onto the fire.

Hellu could mind a fire well enough, but the pot was hard to get into the tiled stove and out of it again. Once in that business she burnt her hand, after which she did not dare so much as try. If her father was not at home, and Tiina Katri not there, she went over to the house side to ask for help, and somebody always came from there.

The father sat mostly bowed over, his head down, sucking at his empty pipe. He did not talk near so much as before, but for all that it felt so safe to Hellu when he was at home. She almost wished he might get no work, for they would be badly frightened with him gone from morning till night and themselves obliged to be alone in the room, in the dusk, and perhaps now and then in the pitch dark too.

But that wish did not come true. The very next week the father went to the railway making, and after that they saw him only at dinner-time in a hurry and late in the evening, a little before bed. Of a morning he was gone already when they woke out of their sleep. On Sundays, on the other hand, he was at home, though he had not the strength then to be up, for he was so tired with the hard week's work that he lay the whole day.

There was another reason too why Holpainen tried to sleep as much as ever sleep would come to him. At work there was no time and no strength for thinking far, but when he came into that empty home and saw those unhappy poor children suffering hunger and want of every kind, then his mind grew heavy, and he was afraid that if he began to grieve too much over his life it would go with him as it had gone with Mari. So he knew no better counsel than to sleep away his cares and sorrows, since in no other way could he get them driven from him.

The railway working was on the slope of Kotkakallio, towards Harjula. He could see well enough the steps of the building Mari was in. When he straightened his back and rested from his work, leaning with both hands on the spade, his eyes went of themselves every time across the inlet and the fields away over there. Often he happened to see the door open and somebody come down the steps. He could not rightly make out whether it was a man or a woman, but what did he do with the knowing of it. Mari it was not, at any rate.

Holpainen dug the ground at the foot of the slope; but higher up were men breaking stone. They were all of them young, and great mockers.

"Hi, Holpainen, come up here!" was shouted from up there one day.

"What is it?" Holpainen shouted back, and looked up.

"Come along, will you."

Holpainen went up to them, a little doubtful.

"There you are. Take it and eat."

"What's that? Stone-crumb?"

"That's it. There, eat it up and don't be shy."

"Hold your tongue. Who's to eat that?"

"Isn't soup good enough for a farm-hand? That's how the gentry reckoned it when they gave us eighty pennies a day for wages — so long as they get bread, let them eat stone-crumb for a relish."

"Keep it and welcome, then, you that break it," said Holpainen, and went back to his own work.

"Yes, yes! And you eat the mud you dig loose out of the ground. But thaw it in your mouth first, don't swallow it frozen, you'll soon have the belly-ache."

"Ha, ha, ha," the others laughed.

Holpainen did not trouble to answer. With his back bent he did his work, drove the spade firmly into the ground and threw a heap of earth up. Every time he stooped, the trousers cracked behind. The holes grew bigger; the air felt cold on his skin.

From the building beside the gate at Harjula there came from time to time a crying voice, roughly deep at one while and shrilly whining at another. The children inside grew quiet then and turned their eyes away from the office. The women left off their work and listened. And far the voice rang out over the country round, over the meadows and the fields, right to the highroad and the yard, to every place. And all the other complaining in the almshouse stopped for that time; the sick forgot their ailments and the children their hunger, the quarrellers their bitter minds. For in that one cry every one of them found their own pain got out into the open, and it felt easier for them then in the breast.

Kuopio, spring 1886.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-01, before any evaluation of this translation was designed and before any published rendering of this work in any language was opened (R05 / charter A4). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Numbering is continuous across the whole work; span 2 begins at D24.

Span 1 — D1–D23

D1 — the target register, chosen before the first sentence and binding on all seven spans. Canth's Finnish here is deliberately plain: short declaratives, ordinary domestic vocabulary, almost no figure, and a narrator who slides in and out of the mother's head without announcing it. The choice was between (a) a modern unmarked contemporary English, (b) a period-idiomatic English of roughly the source's own decade, and (c) a flattened "neutral" translationese. (b) is chosen, and specifically the plain end of it — "right enough", "not a rap", "the minute I get to a baking", "provident" — because the alternative that tempts is not (a) but a smoothed (a) that would make this prose read like contemporary literary fiction, which is exactly the thing the source refuses to be. The cost is real and is declared: an English reader in 2026 will hear the register as dated, where a Finnish reader in 1886 heard it as bare. Recorded in register.md as V1.

D2 — «guillemets» → double quotes. The source uses »…» throughout, the Finnish typographic convention. Under this artifact's declared purpose — a reading edition, no facing text — the marks carry nothing the reader can use, and keeping them would be a source-access move of exactly the kind D-20260801-10 has just refused as a sense and relocated to purpose. Converted. This is the first decision in this project taken with the ratified declared-purpose parameter explicitly in hand, which is why it is logged at all: under a crib purpose it would have gone the other way.

D3 — hän has no gender, and English will not let me keep that. The pronoun does eleven turns of work in the first paragraph alone, and every one of them has to be resolved into he or she in English. All are recoverable from context here, so no invention was needed — but the resolution is compulsory, not chosen, and under accuracy's compelled-specification clause (D-20260727-08, the ratified language-pair-baseline rule) it carries no penalty. The one place it bites is paragraph 1, where "Hän väänteli ja itki" switches referent from the mother to the baby with nothing but the verb to mark it; English needed a noun, and I put in "The child twisted and cried". That is an addition of a lexical item, and it is the avoidable/inescapable line: the pronoun resolution is inescapable, the noun is a choice made to keep the sentence readable.

D4 — sitä for the baby. The father says «Mikä sitä vaivaa?» — literally what ails it. In colloquial Finnish sitä for a small child is unremarkable and carries no coldness. English it for a named infant is markedly dehumanising and would make the father a worse man than the source makes him. Rendered "What ails her?" — and the loss is stated rather than compensated: the pair's baseline makes the English father warmer than the Finnish one. Alternatives considered and rejected: "the child" (kills the pronoun), "it" (imports a judgement the source does not make).

D5 — «Eikö liene kipeä.» → "Ill, I suppose." A potential-mood verb with no question mark. The mood is the whole content — she does not know, and has stopped expecting to find out. A full sentence ("She must be ill") would give her more certainty than she has; a question ("Isn't she ill?") would give her more energy.

D6 — the man / the wife. Canth's narration names them mies and vaimo — the man, the wife — long before it gives the surname Holpainen, and never says aviomies (husband). The flatness is class-marked and is not an accident. Kept literally as "the man" and "the wife", at the cost of a slight oddity in English, where "the man" in a domestic interior reads as a stranger for half a sentence. register.md V2 binds this for the whole work.

D7 — äiti as the narrator's name for Mari. The narration calls her äiti (the mother) far more often than Mari, and the alternation is not random: Mari appears at the moments when she is alone with the fact of her situation ("In the black dark Mari was left with her sick child"), äiti when she is functioning. Preserved exactly, including the run of six consecutive "the mother"s in the morning sequence, which English style would ordinarily break up with pronouns. This is the decision I am least sure of and the one most likely to be reopened by span 3 or 4.

D8 — the four koetti. «koetti tarjota rintaa, koetti painaa … koetti hyväilyillään …» — three bare anaphoric verbs after an initial one. English cannot repeat "tried" four times without the repetition reading as style, where in Finnish it reads as exhaustion. Kept all four ("tried taking … tried giving … tried pressing … tried stroking"), on the ground that this is the paragraph's only rhetorical figure and removing it would leave the prose with none.

D9 — «sydän porahti alas piippuun». sydän is the candle's wick (lit. heart), piippu its socket, porahti an onomatopoeic sudden collapse. "the wick guttering down into the socket and going black" — and heart is deliberately not reached for. English heart of the candle exists but would manufacture a figure the Finnish does not have, because in Finnish sydän is simply the technical word.

D10 — lippu from the piiritarkastaja. A chit from the district poor-relief inspector entitling the holder to free treatment. Three handlings were live: substitute into the English poor-law vocabulary ("an order for the doctor" — exact, period-right, and added realia: it imports an English institution the Kuopio poor board is not); gloss; or transparent calque. Calque chosen — "a ticket" — with the institution left to be inferred from "the district inspector". Under cultural-mediation's ratified strategy set this is the same move as 血の池 → "Pond of Blood": the words are transparent, the institution stays foreign.

D11 — «Jumal' antakoon» is not translated as a sentence. It is the fixed Finnish answer to a greeting (God grant it), not a wish anyone is making. Cut, and the exchange rendered as bare greeting. (This site falls just past span 1's boundary; the decision is taken now because the greeting recurs and the register must bind. Recorded so span 2 does not re-decide it.)

D12 — «sokuri», «Elä», «Elkää», «vaan», «kumminkin»: the dialect layer is not rendered as dialect. The speech and much of the narration carry eastern Finnish and colloquial forms — elä for älä, sokuri for sokeri, vaan for vain. Every English option for marking this is worse than not marking it: a named English dialect (Yorkshire, Scots) relocates the family to England; eye-dialect apostrophes make them comic; "translationese rustic" is a class slur with no referent. The layer is carried instead by syntax and idiom rather than by spelling — "right enough", "not so bad as that", "the minute I get to a baking", "he cared not a rap". This is a loss recorded as a loss, not a solution, and it is the single largest thing this translation gives up. register.md V3.

D13 — «Ei hän raahtinut vielä Helluakaan herättää». raahtia (dial. raatsia) is not "could not be bothered" — it is had not the heart to, a specifically Finnish verb for grudging something to someone you love. "She had not the heart to wake even Hellu yet." Note that the same English phrase is then needed at D-nn below for hennoa ("ei hennonut miehelle sanoa"), a different Finnish verb with a closely overlapping sense; two source verbs collapse into one English phrase, and that is a consistency cost I am choosing knowingly rather than manufacturing a distinction English does not have.

D14 — «oli sitä niin paljon, että tuli rippuinen kullekin». "There was so much of it that each of them got a scrap." The irony is structural — so much governing a scrap — and survives the move intact, which is worth recording because almost nothing else about the poverty is ironised.

D15 — the agentless passive. «koetettiin olla hiljaa» — it was tried to be quiet. Finnish has a true agentless passive; English does not, so the sentence must acquire a subject. "they tried to keep quiet" invents a they that the Finnish leaves unassigned. Inescapable under the same baseline rule as D3.

D16 — subjectless narrative verbs. «Käski Hellun laittamaan tulta.» «Katseli, kuinka äiti teki työtä.» Colloquial Finnish drops the subject when it is recoverable; the effect is a narration that moves at the speed of the room. English requires "She told Hellu…", "he lay watching…". I have compensated once, by folding two such sentences into one longer one ("The man was awake again too, and lay watching the mother work until…"), so that the added subjects do not each start a new sentence. Compensation declared; it is not free.

D17 — «tuuditti uskoa». The 1917 text reads tuuditti uskoa — "rocked faith(?)". uskoa is the partitive of usko, faith, and the phrase is not idiomatic Finnish as it stands. The most economical readings are (a) a typesetter's or OCR slip for uskollisesti, faithfully, or (b) an elliptical uskoa = kept the faith of it, i.e. rocked on trustingly. Rendered "rocked away faithfully", which is compatible with both. This is a textual, not a translation, decision, and it is flagged for the second-witness check the arm should run before span 4 — this project has found eleven OCR errors in a single source before (S031) by comparing two witnesses, and one witness is what this span had.

D18 — «Näytä tänne kyntesi» → "Show me your claws." kynnet is nails/claws. A mother's idiom for hands, half-affectionate and half-accusing. "Show me your hands" is the safe rendering and loses the idiom entirely; "claws" keeps it at the price of sounding slightly stranger in English than in Finnish. Kept. This is the clearest case in the span where I have chosen style-correspondence over naturalness, and the trade is named rather than averaged.

D19 — «yhyy» → "waah". A child's sob rendered as sound. Finnish yhyy is the conventional orthography; English has no single convention. "boo-hoo" is comic and adult; "waah" is a small child. Kept in both occurrences for consistency.

D20 — «Happamet kyynelet» → "Sour tears." hapan is sour (of milk, of dough), not bitter (karvas), and Canth uses karvas twice earlier in this same span for the lump in Mari's throat. Two different words, deliberately. Kept as "sour" even though English "bitter tears" is the ready collocation and "sour tears" is not — because taking the collocation would erase the distinction the source drew inside a thousand words.

D21 — «pujoi nyrkkiään» → "shook her fist". pujoa is dialectal (to thrust/shake). No English verb carries both the dialect marking and the gesture; the gesture is kept and the marking is lost, under D12's policy.

D22 — «vaivaiseksi pieksän» → "beat you into a cripple". vaivainen in this register is both cripple and pauper — the word for the parish poor, vaivaishoito being poor relief. The threat therefore has a second edge the English cannot hold: I will beat you into the very condition we are in. "cripple" chosen, and the pauper sense recorded here as lost. Of everything in span 1 this is the loss I would most like back.

D23 — paragraph integrity. Canth's paragraphs are long and run several beats together; the temptation in English is to split them at the dialogue. Not split. Paragraph boundaries are byte-for-byte the source's throughout span 1, so that a later span can be compared against this one on the same unit.

Span 2 — D24–D46

Frozen 2026-08-02, before any evaluation of this span was designed and before Hertzberg's Swedish was opened for this span (R05 / charter A4). Span 1's study limb (RS-20260801h) opened Hertzberg after span 1's freeze; the same order is kept here, and nothing below was written with the Swedish in view.

What this span is, and why the register is under load in it. Span 1 was one room and one family, all of them poor. Span 2 is the first prose in this work where the class line is crossed: a landlord comes for the rent and takes the bed, and Mari then walks into town and asks three people above her for help — a benevolent widow, a shopgirl she was at school with, and a merchant's wife who refuses her. Four exchanges across the line in 1,782 words, which is what register.md §Unresolved 2 said the register had never been tested on.

D24 — Jumal' antakoon: V10 fails its first and only test, and the pre-decision that made it was taken from too far away. ERRATUM 1. D11 decided this formula in span 1 — cut it, render the exchange as a bare greeting — explicitly reaching past span 1's boundary to do so, "because the greeting recurs and the register must bind." It does not recur: Jumal' antakoon occurs exactly once in the whole novella, at ¶79, and ¶79 is here. So V10 was a rule with one instance, written before its instance was read. Read in place, the exchange is: Heikura says «Hyvää huomenta!» — a secular greeting — and Mari answers with a pious formula. The asymmetry between the two is the first class marking in the work, and cutting the formula deletes it, leaving two neutral good mornings. Rendered "God grant it": literal, slightly opaque in English, and the opacity is accepted because the alternative erases the thing the span was chosen to test. Alternatives considered: "God bless you" (naturalises it into an English piety and loses that it is a fixed answer, not a wish); "And to you" (keeps the answering function, loses the piety entirely); D11's cut (loses both). register.md V10 is superseded by V10a.

D25 — isäntä is split, and the split is a consistency cost taken deliberately. One Finnish word covers Heikura in narration («Heikura, talon isäntä») and in Mari's mouth («isäntä kulta», «Jos ottaisitte isäntä»). English has no word that does both: landlord is the transparent term for the relation but is unusable as a vocative to his face, and master is usable as a vocative but imports a master–servant relation the rent contract is not. Narration takes "the landlord", address takes "master" — and "master dear" for «isäntä kulta», which is the same vocative-plus-endearment shape span 1 already fixed at «äiti kulta» → "mother dear". The defence of the split is that it is the same defence Canth's own usage does not need; the objection to it is that an English reader will not know the two words are one. register.md V11.

D26 — näettekös / näet is a class marker English can carry, and it is the only one in this span that survives intact. The explanatory particle (you see, d'you see) is used three times, all downward: twice by Heikura to Mari and once by Hanna to Mari. Mari never uses it to anyone. Rendered "d'you see" throughout. The direction is preserved without effort because English has the same particle with the same condescension in it.

D27 — third-person address, and the site where the span's central loss happens. At ¶132 Mari says to the merchant's wife: «Kyllä minä ihan varmaan rouvalle toimittaisin» — I would certainly get it to the lady, speaking to the lady. Finnish (like Swedish and German) lets an inferior address a superior in the third person, and the self-abasement is grammatical: she removes herself from the second person. English has no such construction at any period. Rendered "I would get it to you as sure as sure, ma'am" — the vocative is the only English resource, and it converts a grammatical act of self-lowering into a marker of ordinary politeness. Alternatives considered: "I'd get it to the lady" (unintelligible as address in English — reads as a third party); "I'd get it to your ladyship" (over-elevates: she is a shopkeeper's wife, not gentry). Declared loss.

D28 — the children address their mother in the honorific plural, and English erases it completely. Hellu asks «Viivyttekö kauan?» — second person plural, to one person, her own mother — and at ¶176 (span 3) says «Nouskaa ylös!», plural imperative, again to her mother. Mari addresses the children in the singular throughout («Elä itke», «Mistä sinä sait»), and her husband in the singular too. So the deference system is not only across the class line: it runs inside the household, and it is asymmetric. English lost thou from ordinary speech well before 1886; "Will you be long?" is the only available sentence, and it says nothing. This is the largest single erasure in the span and there is no compensation available that would not be a fabrication.

D29 — the zero person: English has a plain-register device Finnish's is neutral about, so the loss runs in both directions. Finnish's zero person («Kun pääsisi edes kesään», «pitäisi sitä sentään joskus pääsemän ansioon», «Joutuu sitten itse pulaan») carries no class marking at all — the same construction is available to a pauper and to a merchant's wife. English has no unmarked equivalent: every option is socially placed. One is genteel, a body is plain and rural, you is casual, a man / a person sit between. So I have had to choose a class for each instance, and the choices are: Mari "a body" (¶86), "a person" (¶126); Heikura "a man" (¶95); the merchant's wife "one … oneself" (¶131); the narrator "one" (¶107, ¶115). This is not a loss but an over-specification — English compels a distinction the source does not draw, and the English text therefore marks the class line at five places where the Finnish is silent. It is the mirror image of D27, and the two together are what the study limb is for.

D30 — a second textual defect in this witness. ¶94 reads «EL» where the sense plainly requires «Ei.» (No. — Mari answering whether her husband has found work). EL is the only all-capital token in the body of the text, which is what a scanno looks like and not what Canth looks like. Rendered "No." Taken with D17's «tuuditti uskoa», this witness now has two suspected defects in 5,000 words read, which raises register.md §Unresolved 5 from a tidy-up to a real need: a second printing should be found before span 4, and D30 is now the stronger of the two reasons.

D31 — «mutta ruotsiksi, ettei Mari ymmärtänyt»: the class line is a language, and English keeps the words while losing the sting. Helena and her gentleman «puhelivat keskenään, mutta ruotsiksi, ettei Mari ymmärtänyt» — talked together, but in Swedish, so that Mari did not understand. In 1886 Finland Swedish was the language of the educated and propertied and Finnish of the poor; Canth, a Fennoman writing in Finnish, puts the barrier on the page as a language her heroine is shut out of. The device is not incidental: it returns at ¶458, where the pastor and the doctor exchange a few words in Swedish over the dying child — the two moments in the novella when the gentry are in the room. Rendered literally, with no gloss and no note, because the artifact's declared purpose is a reading edition without apparatus. What is kept: the fact, and the inference — an English reader who sees that they switch and she cannot follow can work out what the switch means from the scene itself. What is lost: that a Finnish reader in 1886 needed no inference at all. Alternatives rejected: "in Swedish, the gentry's language" (a gloss smuggled into the narration, and added realia of exactly the kind D10 refused); a footnote (excluded by purpose).

D32 — hyyry, and the Swedish loans in the mouths of the poor. The word for rent in this work is hyyry (< Swedish hyra) six times, and standard Finnish vuokra not once. The same layer gives vissisti (< visst, "for certain"), matrassi, konvehti, kurantti. The poor speak a Finnish full of Swedish, and the gentry speak Swedish; the loan words are the class line showing through the vocabulary the way ¶111 shows it through the scene. English has one word, "rent", with no history in it. Declared loss; there is no English lexical layer that would do this without relocating the family.

D33 — kamreeri / kamreerska → "the comptroller" / "the comptroller's wife". A Swedish-derived title of office, with the feminine -ska marking the wife-of. English has no productive suffix of this kind, so the derivation becomes a possessive — the same handling span 1 gave pormestarinna → "the mayor's wife", and kept for consistency.

D34 — rouva is split three ways, and this is the span's other knowing consistency cost. One Finnish word covers Mrs Hiller, the merchant's wife, and the form of address to either. English takes "the lady" for Mrs Hiller (whose standing in the text is moral, not commercial), "the mistress" for the merchant's wife (whose standing is her shop, and whom Hanna serves), and "ma'am" in address. The split is legible and, I think, right; it is still one word going to three.

D35 — the charity vocabulary, and V8 gets its first test. rouvasyhtiö → "the ladies' society"; piirinaiset → "the district ladies"; and lippu recurs at ¶118 and is again "a ticket", the transparent calque D10 chose. This is the first recurrence of a V-bound term in a different institutional frame (poor-relief medicine in span 1, charity needlework here) and it holds without strain. V8 confirmed.

D36 — havu → "the fir-twigs". Spruce twigs scattered at a doorstep in place of a mat, a Finnish domestic realia. Calqued transparently rather than substituted ("the doormat" would delete it), on D10's strategy.

D37 — «En kuin siunaaman hetken» → "No longer than a blessing takes." Literally not but a blessing's moment; idiomatic Finnish for a moment. "Not above a minute" is the natural English and loses the piety, which in this span is class-marked speech (cf. D24). Kept.

D38 — «Onnen toukoa» → "Trusting to luck". Literally luck's sowing, a fixed idiom for acting at random. No English figure available; the sense is kept and the figure lost.

D39 — «niin kuranttia tavaraa … kuin jauhot ovat» → "so quick-selling a commodity as flour". kurantti is a commercial loan (current, readily saleable). The register is the point: it is a trade word, in the mouth of the only character in the span who talks like a business.

D40 — the merchant's wife's syntax is the one class marker English carries at full strength. Everyone else in the span speaks with the particles and clitics of colloquial Finnish — Heikura's «Eikös», «Kyllähän se ikävää on», «minkä sille voi»; Mari's «poloiset», «toki», «Enhän minä»; Hanna's «Eikös mitä». The merchant's wife has none of them: full standard forms, «Sitä paitse», «kenellekään», and a commercial vocabulary. English can do this, and does: she is the only speaker in the span given uncontracted verbs ("I do not know you", "I do not care to give anybody credit", "exceedingly small") against everyone else's contractions. Not a compensation — a straight carry.

D41 — «Ei ollut puukaluja muita kuin…» → "There was not a stick of furniture in it now but…" puukalu is wooden furniture; "not a stick of" is period-plain English that keeps the wood inside the idiom. V1.

D42 — subjectless narrative verbs, the second compensation. «Eteenpäin käveli» → "On she walked"; the fronted adverbial keeps the sentence from starting on an added subject, which is the same compensation D16 made in span 1 by folding two sentences into one. Used once. The other eleven subjectless verbs in the span («Pääsi vihdoin», «Tuli pihaan», «Koetti miettiä», …) simply take "she", with no compensation attempted.

D43 — «kun vaan olisi tointa» → "if only there were any push in him". toimi is activity, enterprise, drive. The clause is Heikura's barb — he has just been told there is no work, and he suggests the fault is in the man. English needed the barb to stay deniable, as it is in Finnish; "push" carries it without stating it.

D44 — «me poloiset», «nämä pienet lapsi raukat» → "us poor creatures", "these poor little children". poloinen and raukka are both poor/wretched with a note of self-pity that is conventional rather than felt; English "poor" twice in one sentence is the closest available and is duller.

D45 — the compelled-specification census that register.md §Unresolved 3 asked for, and the question it asked turns out to be the wrong one. The register expected trouble from hän with three adults in a room. It did not happen: hän-resolution forced no added noun anywhere in span 2 — 0 sites, against span 1's 1 (the "The child twisted and cried" site). The reason is that Canth disambiguates for herself: at ¶130, where Mari and the merchant's wife alternate inside one sentence, the Finnish supplies «rouva» at the switch. What does force additions is the zero person and the passive — 8 sites in span 2, listed here so the count is auditable: ¶86 "a body", ¶95 "a man", ¶107 "one", ¶115 "people", ¶115 "they", ¶115 "one", ¶126 "a person", ¶131 "one/oneself". Every one is a generic referent supplied where the Finnish has none, and every one is class-marked in English (D29). Span 1's comparable figure was 2 (D15's «koetettiin», plus «Saihan»-type sites it did not enumerate). The rate is a function of scene, not of length: span 2 is full of gnomic free-indirect thought, and the zero person is how Finnish thinks gnomically.

D46 — paragraph integrity, second span. 58 source paragraphs → 58 English paragraphs, boundaries byte-for-byte the source's, no split at dialogue. V5 holds.

Span 3 — D47–D64

Frozen 2026-08-03, before any evaluation of this span was designed and before Hertzberg's Swedish was opened for this span (R05 / charter A4). Same order as spans 1 and 2: the Swedish is opened afterwards, deliberately, as the study limb, and nothing below was written with it in view.

What this span is. Span 2 crossed the class line four times with Mari walking upward into other people's houses. Span 3 does two things span 2 could not. First it puts Mari beside somebody poorer than herself — a woman from Karttula on the beggar's road with four children, a husband rotting in a drying-barn — and the two of them talk for thirty paragraphs as equals. Then it reverses the direction of span 2: the gentry come down into the poor room while Mari is asleep on the floor. register.md §Unresolved named four things this span had to settle, and the honorific site at ¶175 first among them.

D47 — a numbering gate, taken first because everything below cites paragraphs. The site citations in spans 1–2 (¶79 Jumal' antakoon, ¶130 «rouva», ¶132 rouvalle, ¶176 Nouskaa) are each one higher than the index of the paragraph they name in ../source-fi-full.txt, while the span ranges (¶2–75, ¶76–133) are the file indices themselves. The two conventions disagree by one and both are in the frozen record. Resolved in favour of the file index, because that is what R05 rule 1 calls load-bearing and what the stored span-N-source.txt files reproduce: this span is ¶134–206, contiguous with span 2, and «Nouskaa ylös!» is ¶175. The earlier site citations are not edited — they are frozen — and the mapping is recorded here instead: a site citation in the span 1–2 logs is one higher than its file index. Separately, translation.md §Source says chapter II begins at paragraph 279; it begins at 307 on either convention, and that sentence is wrong. No rendering depends on any of this. (Method work, done as a gate inside the unit it blocks — continue-prompt.md §4.5.)

D48 — vaimo outside the Holpainen house, and V2 turns out not to be about the Holpainens. V2 fixed mies = "the man" and vaimo = "the wife" as this couple's flatness. Span 3 has the same two words used by and about strangers: Canth calls the Karttula woman vaimo throughout the narration, and Mari asks her «Elääkö teillä mies?» Rendered "the woman" in narration and "your man" in address — and the reason V2 does not simply extend is that «the wife» in narration would need a husband already in the frame, which the stranger has not got until she supplies him. So: vaimo is "the wife" only where the man is the other pole of the pair, and "the woman" otherwise; mies is "the man" / "your man" everywhere. What this settles about V2 is that its flatness is the class's vocabulary, not the couple's — the same two nouns do the same work in a household Mari has never met.

D49 — V15 needed a clause it did not have, and a woman found it. V15 assigns the English generic by class: Mari "a body"/"a person", other plain speakers "a man", genteel speakers and the narrator "one". The Karttula woman is a plain speaker using the zero person about herself four times, and "a man" is unusable. Rendered "a body" throughout for her, on the ground that V15's real axis is class and "a man" was assigned in span 2 to Heikura, who is one. V15 is read as: the generic is class-matched, and gender-matched where the speaker is inside it. No erratum — the rule is not contradicted, only under-specified, and the specification is recorded here.

D50 — «ohimovika» is not resolved and is frozen unresolved. «Sillä on kurjalla ohimovika, ettei kestä astua kuin pienen matkaa aina kerrallaan» — of a boy who cannot walk far. ohimo is the temple of the head; ohimovika is not in the standard modern lexicon in a sense that fits a walking complaint. Rendered "a trouble in his head" — the most literal reading of the compound that the following clause will bear. Alternatives considered: "a weakness" (safe, empties the word); "fits" (diagnoses, and the text does not); a reading from ohi- "past, passing" giving "a passing complaint" (contradicted by «aina kerrallaan», which makes it chronic). This is the one word in the span I would most like a second witness on, and the Swedish is checkable after the freeze — which is the order, not a convenience.

D51 — kunta → "the commune", a third institution kept foreign. «Eikö teillä ole apua kunnalta?» The civil commune administered vaivaishoito, and the ready English is "the parish", which is D10/V8's exact error: it installs the English poor law inside a Finnish town. "the commune" — transparent, mildly odd, and consistent with lippu → "a ticket" and piiritarkastaja → "the district inspector". Alternatives: "the parish" (rejected, above); "the township" (a New England institution); "the district" (already spent on the inspector).

D52 — kappa → "peck". An old Finnish dry measure of 5.46 litres; the imperial peck is 9.09. Not equal, and taken anyway, because "two pecks of grain a week" is a period English sentence and "two kappas" is a footnote in a book that declared it would have none. The quantity is wrong by two fifths and the fact — a fixed weekly dole of grain, for the man only — is right. Recorded as an accuracy cost, not hidden as an equivalence.

D53 — arvon is a particle, not a noun, and it is fixed as "sure enough". «On niitä arvon vielä hyviäkin ihmisiä maailmassa» (¶153), «nyt hän sen arvon laittoi näkyvistä pois» (¶194), «Siellä arvon taitaa Holpainen nyt tulla» (¶232, span 4). Eastern evidential from arvata, to guess: "I dare say", "sure enough". "sure enough" in both of this span's occurrences, chosen over "I dare say" because it works in narration as well as in speech and the third occurrence is narration. Terminology table updated so span 4 does not re-decide it.

D54 — the hymn: metre kept, rhyme not manufactured, one filler word admitted and named. The source quatrain is trochaic 8/7/8/7 and does not rhyme («tänne / pois / tänne / taivaasen»). English hymnody at this period rhymes almost without exception, and taking the convention would have meant inventing a line. Kept unrhymed, in the source's metre. The cost is at the last line: «Ota kaikki taivaasen» is six English syllables and the metre wants seven, so "above" is added — a hymn-tag with no content, and the only word in the quatrain that is not in the Finnish. Named here because a reader cannot see it.

D55 — «vastarannan kiiski», and the reason "as solemn as a judge" was refused. Ville stands «totinen kuin vastarannan kiiski» — solemn as a ruffe from the opposite shore, a fixed Finnish simile for a contrary, immovable person. Rendered "as solemn as a fish." The calque keeps the image class and drops the idiom's second half (the contrariness), which the surrounding sentences supply anyway — Ville will not be moved by three tugs. The alternative that reads best in English is "as solemn as a judge", and it is refused on V8's own ground: it is an English institution put into a Savo poor-room, and the register has spent two spans keeping English institutions out of this book. A translation that will not say "the parish" cannot say "a judge".

D56 — «Ähä, kutti» → "Aha, serves you right". The Finnish children's jeer at another child's misfortune. English has no period-safe equivalent particle: "sucks to you" and "yah boo" are twentieth-century, "sold again" is adult slang. The sense is rendered and the particle is lost, with the repetition («ähä, ähä») carrying what is left of the sound.

D57 — ¶175, «Nouskaa ylös!»: the site register.md reserved for this span, and the compensation V14a licensed turns out not to be available here. Hellu, nine years old, wakes her mother in front of two visiting ladies: «Äiti, täällä on rouvia. Nouskaa ylös!» — second person plural imperative to one person, her own mother. It is the strongest form of the honorific in the novella and one of only two occurrences.

What V14a put on the table. Hertzberg 1886 dropped the pronominal honorific — which Swedish has — and marked the relation with a kin term instead («Blir mamma länge borta?»), at the span 2 site whose Finnish, «Viivyttekö kauan?», carries no vocative at all. That device cannot be used here, because Canth has already spent it: ¶173, ¶175 and ¶177 contain «Äiti» four times. Adding a kin term to a sentence that opens with one adds nothing. A compensation competes for the same slot as the source's own marking, and this is the first time in three spans that the slot was occupied.

The two carriers English actually has, and why both are refused. (i) "ma'am" is the exact functional analogue — a child using the deferential address term to a parent — and it is refused because V12 has already assigned "ma'am" to rouva in address: a daughter calling her mother ma'am inside a scene containing two actual rouvat would make the mother sound like one of them. (ii) The thou/you contrast carries this system exactly, and in 1886 was still live in English regional speech with precisely this asymmetry — intimate and downward thou, respectful and upward you. It is refused because V3 forbids named regional English anywhere in this book. That refusal is worth stating plainly: the loss here is not a limit of English. It is the price of a register decision taken in span 1, at D12, about a different problem.

What was taken. "Mother, there's ladies here. Please to get up!" — the period politeness formula, below-stairs in flavour, which in a child's mouth to her mother marks the relation as one of respect without naming it. Taken at this site only: ¶173 and ¶177 have no honorific in the Finnish and get none in the English. The cost is exact and is not hidden: the source's form is deference and urgency at once, and "please to" converts it into politeness, which is a slower thing. Whether it reads as marking or as padding is not a question the translator can answer about his own sentence, and it is put to independent readers this session (E-20260803b-honorific-carry). register.md V18.

D58 — register.md §Unresolved 2 is answered, and the answer is not the one the question expected. The question was whether the gentry coming down into the poor room reverses the address forms V12 and V13 were fixed on. It does not reverse them. It abolishes them. In the whole visit — thirty-two paragraphs, ¶172–194 — the two ladies speak three times, and all three to Petu, a small boy in a frock. They never address Mari at all. Mari speaks to them twice, at ¶180 and ¶183, and uses no second-person form of any kind: the first is a panicked account of herself, the second a lament in the third person, and both end by turning to her own child. V13's loss — the third-person deference to a lady's face — has no site in this span, because the scene contains no address across the class line in either direction. English carries this perfectly, and carries it for free, because it is a fact about who speaks to whom, not about grammar. The most class-marked thing in the span is the one thing the translation loses nothing of. V13 gets no second clause; it gets a note that its site did not recur.

D59 — kakku → "rye-cake". «Tuossa saat kakkua» — in a house that has two cold potatoes and a borrowed crust. Standard Finnish kakku is cake; in eastern dialect it is a round flat rye loaf, and the referent here is certainly the second. "cake" alone would put a sweet into this room, so "rye-cake" — transparent, and the compound tells an English reader what kind of thing it is. Flagged as a reading, not a certainty.

D60 — the second-person census, and the reason the honorific decision is a claim and not a flourish. Span 3 contains twenty-one sites where Finnish marks the second person, and English renders every one of them "you". Set out by what the marking is doing:

The three uses of te are formally identical, and two of them are in the same mouth within twenty-five paragraphs. At ¶151 the Karttula woman says «Pysykää nyt lähellä» to two children and then «Sinä, Sere, ota minua hameesta kiinni» to one of them — a minimal pair proving that her plural is number. At ¶175 only one person is addressed. So a compensation at ¶175 is not the addition of a marker; it is the assertion of a reading — that this te is the deferential one and not the numeric one — and the evidence for the reading is the minimal pair twenty-four paragraphs earlier. That is the sort of thing a long work makes visible and an extract cannot.

Two facts fall out that the register did not ask for. There is not one instance in this span of V addressed to a social superior — the form the project has been treating as the central case simply does not occur here, because the only cross-class scene has no address in it (D58). And the one downward sinä from officialdom, «Nuori olet, tee työtä», is reported speech inside the woman's own account — the commune addresses her in the singular and she quotes it, which is the sharpest class marking in the span and is invisible in English.

D61 — the zero-person count, third span. Span 1 = 2, span 2 = 8, span 3 = 7: ¶136 «vaikka katkeaisi» → "though a body dropped down"; ¶141 «Koetetaan astua» → "we'll try to step out" (the passive doing first-person-plural work, and English must supply the person); ¶149 «kun ei saa työtä» → "when there's no work to be had, not if a body begged"; ¶149 «täytyi viimein pesästään irtaantua» → "then a body had to break out of the nest"; ¶167 «Joka vaan pääsisikin» → "if a body could only get away"; ¶171 «olisi huoneen saanut kaataa» → "one might surely have pulled the room down"; ¶183 «saa vaan kärsiä» → "it's pain and hunger a body has to bear". Running total 17. One further site is not counted and is listed so the count stays honest: ¶198 «kuinka vähän on kykyä työhön sillä, jonka mieltä…» supplies its own demonstrative, so "in a body whose mind" adds nothing — but it is still class-marked in English where the Finnish is neutral. The rate tracks scene, not length, as span 2 said: this span's seven are concentrated in the two passages of gnomic free-indirect thought.

D62 — a third suspected defect in the witness, in the same shape as the first two. ¶197 reads «Vesi el kumminkaan mitään maksa» — el for ei, lower-case, mid-sentence. register.md §Settled 5 recorded ¶94's «EL» for «Ei.» as the only all-capital token in the body of the text, and D17's «tuuditti uskoa». The i/l substitution now appears twice, which makes ¶94 much more likely to be the same typesetting or OCR error than a deliberate emphasis. Rendered as ei ("Water costs nothing, when all's said"). This strengthens rather than discharges the standing requirement for a second printing before span 4, and narrows what it is for: the question is now specifically whether a second witness reads ei at ¶94 and ¶197.

D63 — raahtia's last occurrence, and §Settled 4 closes for good. ¶163: «jopa hän olisi oikea peto, jos raahtisi heitä jättää» → "she would be a real brute indeed if she had the heart to leave them" — the same English phrase span 1 used for hennoa. This is the second and final occurrence of raahtia in the novella. The collapse of raahtia and hennoa into one English idiom is now complete and cost three tokens across 13,525 words, exactly as span 2 predicted. No further site exists; the question is closed and does not carry into span 4.

D64 — paragraph integrity, third span. 73 source paragraphs → 73 English paragraphs, boundaries byte-for-byte the source's, no split at dialogue, the hymn kept as one paragraph as in the source. V5 holds. 1,795 Finnish → 2,778 English words, factor 1.548 (span 1: 1.50; span 2: 1.55). Three spans in, the projection stands: ~20,300 finished English words, eight spans.

Span 4 — D65–D83

Frozen 2026-08-03, before any evaluation of this span was designed and before Hertzberg's Swedish was opened for this span (R05 / charter A4). One thing is new in the order of work and is declared here: a second Finnish printing was collated before and during the translation, because register.md §Settled-5 made it a requirement before span 4 rather than a tidy-up. That is a source witness, not a rendering of the source, so it is not what charter A4 forbids; the full record is ../collation.md.

What this span is. The politics of the book, spoken by the people it is about. Anni's screaming brings the neighbours in; Tiina Katri and Koponen's Lopo dose the baby with Hoffmann's drops; the two husbands come home and the five of them work out, sitting on a heap of clothes in a room with no bed in it, what eighty pennies a day on the new railway will mean. Then Tiina Katri carries in a dish of potato soup, Mari eats four spoonfuls so the children can have the rest, and the day ends with Mari alone in the dark seeing her small son's grown face behind the barred windows of the gaol. register.md §Unresolved named four things for this span; all four are answered below, and the third was a prediction with a stated falsification condition.

D65 — the copy-text, and a rule that is not about a site. The 1886 Edlund first edition (W4) is reachable, free, and is a genuinely independent witness; the three e-texts the project could find (W1 Gutenberg 13976, W2 Projekti Lönnrot 99, W3 Finnish Wikisource) are one transcription of one posthumous reprint, and reproduce every suspected defect character for character. W4 becomes the copy-text from this span onward, W1 consulted at every substantive divergence and followed where W4 is a manifest slip. Full argument, the eight substantive variants in this span, and what each cost: ../collation.md. register.md V21. This is a policy about the text being translated, not a rule written for an unread site, so V17 does not reach it; and it is recorded here rather than silently applied because six renderings below depend on it.

D66 — the two standing suspicions are settled, and the project had them right. ¶94's «EL» and ¶197's «Vesi el» are W1 corruptions: the first edition reads Ei at both, read off the page scan (collation.md §2). Both had already been rendered as ei. No erratum: the readings do not change. ¶228's unbalanced quotation is not a corruption — it is in the first edition too — and is therefore a translator's problem, taken at D72.

D67 — se of a person is not "it". Every character in this book says se of the baby — «Ihan se kuolee», «Ei se ota», «ei se tuosta välitä», «Kyllä sitä varmaan puree» — where the narrator says hän. The contrast is spoken register against written, and in Finnish se of a person is the ordinary colloquial pronoun and carries no coldness whatever. English "it" of an infant carries a great deal. Rendered "she" throughout, in speech as in narration, on V2's own principle read the right way round: V2 keeps flatness where the source is flat, and here rendering flat would add contempt that is not in the Finnish. A declared loss, and a loss it is better to take than to compensate: the alternative — marking the characters' speech some other way — would invent a distinction where Finnish has an unmarked default. register.md V22.

D68 — herrat → "the gentry". «Ei ne herrat välitä köyhästä enemmän kuin koirasta.» The word is the class, not a set of individuals, and it is the counterpart of rouva (V12). "The gentlemen" reads as particular men; "the masters" collides with V11's isäntä; "the bosses" is twentieth-century. "The gentry" is period, plain, and lets Lopo say it twice without strain.

D69 — the money and the State stay Finnish. penni → "pennies" (transparent, per V8): "eighty pence" would install British coin in a Kuopio poor-room, which is D10's exact error, and the number eighty is the whole point of the scene. ruunu (dialect kruunu) → "the Crown" — the period English word for the same thing, and it keeps Lopo's grim joke intact: get into gaol or into the infirmary and the Crown will keep you. henkiraha → "head-money", calqued, because "poll-tax" is an English institution with an English history.

D70 — Hokmanni → "Hoffmann's". Hoffmann's drops (ether and spirit), sold in every apothecary's of the period and given to a screaming infant here. The Finnish is the proprietary name half-declined; "four or five drops of Hoffmann's" keeps the ellipsis and the shape.

D71 — kitupiikki → "a skinflint", and the sentence licenses the calque. Tiina Katri lends them «pienen läkkisen lampun, jota hän sanoi kitupiikiksi» — a small tin lamp with a wick so mean it barely burns; the word is the ordinary Finnish for a miser. English has no name for the object. "a little tin lamp, which she called a skinflint" — the calque is safe precisely because Canth frames it as her name for it, so the strangeness is inside the fiction and not in the translation. Alternatives: "a pinch-penny" (same joke, worse rhythm); naming the object ("a slut-lamp", a real period word) — refused, because it answers a question the source does not ask and deletes the naming.

D72 — ¶228's unbalanced quotation: the quote is reopened, and that is an editorial act. The first edition prints «"Itse hyvä Jumala tiennee, mitä hän tekee", lausui Tiina Katri, mutta panee se ihmisen välistä pitkään ajattelemaan … asettanut."» — direct speech, a narrative tag, then speech again with no opening mark, closing with one. Three readings were live: reproduce the anomaly (rejected — V6 declared a reading edition, and an unbalanced quote in English reads as a printer's error and nothing else); render everything after mutta as free indirect discourse with no marks (rejected — the closing mark shows the compositor took it for speech, tää maailman meno is her mouth, and the final sentence is unmistakably hers); or close and reopen around the tag, which is what any English editor would do and what was done. The cost is that English tidies something the Finnish leaves ragged, and this is the one place in four spans where the translation is neater than its original. Recorded because a reader cannot see it.

D73 — arvon's third and last occurrence, and D53's prediction about it was wrong in a way worth recording. D53 fixed arvon = "sure enough" in advance, and defended the choice partly on the ground that "the third occurrence is narration" and "I dare say" would not sit there. ¶232 is not narration: «"Siellä arvon taitaa Holpainen nyt tulla", lausui Mari» — it is dialogue with a speech tag. The gloss is unaffected and sits; it also sits in the genuine narration occurrence in this span, ¶221 («they got her at last, sure enough, to quiet down»), which D53 did not know about. So arvon runs to four occurrences, not three, split two speech and two narration, and one English word covers all four. No erratum — no rendering changes. What changes is the standing of D53's argument: the decision was right and one of its reasons was not, and V17's real lesson holds (a site not yet read is not evidence, even when the call it supports turns out well).

D74 — register.md §Settled-4 was closed one token early: there is a third verb. Span 2 counted raahtia (¶8, ¶164) and hennoa (¶25) and closed the question, and span 3 (D63) declared the collapse "complete" at three tokens across 13,525 words. ¶287 has raskita: «ei hän raskinut sitä kovin paljon ottaa» → "she had not the heart to take much of it" — the same English idiom, a fourth token, a third Finnish verb. It is the novella's only occurrence. The cost of the collapse is four tokens and three verbs, not three tokens and two verbs, and the conclusion is unchanged: still not worth manufacturing an English distinction for. §Settled-4 reopens and closes again, corrected. This is what a whole-work count is for and a span-by-span count is not; the whole-text search was run this session and the family is now closed by exhaustion, not by prediction.

D75 — the title occurs once in the book, and it is Lopo who says it. «tietävät, että jäähän niitä orjia vielä heidän varalleen, koska köyhää kansaa on maassa paljon» (¶248). A whole-text search returns exactly one occurrence of the title phrase, in the mouth of the poorest woman in the novella, inside the political speech at the centre of this span. Rendered "since there's poor people in plenty in the land", and the English title of this translation is therefore fixed as "Poor People" so that the sentence carries it. "Poor Folk" is refused only because it is Dostoevsky's in English and would put a loud allusion in a book that makes none. A reader of the English will meet the title where a reader of the Finnish does, which is the whole of what this decision buys.

D76 — Canth's mothers command children in the third person, and English can do it. ¶275: «vartoo siksi kuin Hellu tulee. Petu menee portille vastamaan» — third-person present indicative used as an order to a child standing in the room. It is not politeness and not distance; it is the ordinary Finnish way of telling a small child what is about to happen. Rendered "Petu's to go to the gate to meet her" — English has the construction ("you're to go", "Petu's to go") in exactly this nursery-and-kitchen register, and V1's period is where it is most at home. This is a fourth address strategy in the book alongside T-singular, V-plural and the vocative, and it is the only one English carries for nothing.

D77 — the second-person census, span 4: register.md §Unresolved 3 was a prediction, and it holds. The question was registered in span 3 with a falsification condition: span 4 opens with the first sustained talk among poor women who all know each other, where D60's grid predicts sinä throughout; if it is te, D60's grid is wrong about what the eight stranger-sites were marking.

Result: 15 second-person sites between acquainted adults of the poor class in this span, and every one is T-singular. Not one te. Tiina Katri → Mari (¶215, ¶217, ¶261, ¶286, ¶288); Mari → Tiina Katri (¶284); Mari → Holpainen (¶234 ×2, ¶236, ¶271); Heiskanen → Holpainen (¶238); ? → Lopo (¶249); adult → child (¶210, ¶220, ¶262).

Six te events occur and five of them are plural by number — the household possessive (¶222 «Mihinkä teidän on sänky joutunut», ¶283 «Toin vähän teillekin»), the company (¶240 «Elkäähän… ennenkuin kuulette»), and the two boys (¶279, ¶284). The sixth is new and is the cell D60 said this book had not yet supplied: ¶248, where Lopo quotes herself addressing the tax officials — «kauluksenkohan otatte hameestani ensi vuonna vai kuoninginko. Taikka luuletteko rahapennin saavanne, kun nyt vihon viimeisen kiskotte» — V-plural upward to officialdom, in reported speech. Span 3 had the mirror image: ¶149, officialdom's downward sinä to a pauper, also reported. Both halves of the asymmetry are in the book, both are inside quotation inside a poor woman's own account, and English renders all four forms "you". The study limb is wiki/findings/results/RS-20260803g-distance-not-deference.md; it is what this span was translated to test, and it revises what the project has been calling deference.

D78 — V18a's count was wrong, and the whole-text search was run rather than the span. register.md §Unresolved 2 says "Both known honorific-to-a-parent sites now read plain" and asks spans 4–8 to record every further occurrence. Span 4 has none. The book has four, all from Hellu to her mother, and one of them is in span 1, already translated: ¶67 «Elkää, hyvä äiti, elkää», rendered "Don't, mother dear, don't" — plain, as V18a requires, so no erratum and no rendering changes. The four are ¶67 (span 1), ¶103 «Viivyttekö kauan?» (span 2), ¶175 «Nouskaa ylös!» (span 3), ¶389 «Äiti, kuulkaa, menenkös taas kaupungille leipää pyytämään?» (chapter II, untranslated). All four confirmed in the 1886 first edition. The loss V18a declares is worth four sites in 13,525 words, which is the number the craft report owes and which no span-by-span count would have produced before span 8. That the register's own count of a feature it had made a rule about was off by half is the argument for doing the count once, over the whole text, the moment the question is asked.

D79 — the zero person, fourth span, and the rate is not about length. Span 1 = 2, span 2 = 8, span 3 = 7, span 4 = 16: ¶218 «Hukassa nyt ollaan»; ¶226 «Kun pääsisi edes kesään»; ¶227 «kuinka huomispäivän yli mennään»; ¶228 «Eihäntä ymmärrä»; ¶239 «päästänee elämään»; ¶243 «millä ne sitten maksetaan hyyryt» and «millä ostetaan puut»; ¶244 «Kun jouten on, syö puolta vähemmän»; ¶247 «ne kumminkin maksetaan»; ¶255 «ellei pääse ansaitsemaan» and «millä lailla ensi talvena eletään»; ¶256 «Rupeaa varastamaan, että pääsee linnaan, taikka toimittaa itsensä lasareettiin»; ¶259 «Kärsii ennemmin ja kituu»; ¶268 «Mitäs meillä syödään»; ¶269 «odotetaan»; ¶292 «ei sitä niin varmaan tiennyt». Running total 33. Span 4 is the same length as span 3 and has more than twice its count, and the reason is the subject: this is the one scene in the book where the poor talk about the condition of the poor rather than about their own afternoon, and Finnish says that in the zero person and the passive. D61 predicted "the rate tracks scene, not length"; this is the strongest case of it, and the cost is paid in English every time — V15/V20 force "a body", "a man", "we" or "one" into sixteen sentences that in Finnish name nobody.

D80 — V9 needs a clause: vaivainen in the liturgical formula is not "cripple". V9 fixes vaivainen = "cripple", with the pauper sense (vaivaishoito) recorded as lost at each recurrence. ¶295 has «minä vaivainen, syntinen ihminen» — the opening words of the Finnish Lutheran confession of sins, which Mari says from memory into the dark. Rendered "I, a poor sinful creature." V9 is about the word used of a person's body; the formula is fixed liturgical text and the same word does different work in it. No erratum; V9 gains the clause. That one Finnish word carries "crippled", "pauper" and "wretched-before-God" is not a fact about this translation's choices — it is why vaivaishoito means poor relief at all, and Canth uses both ends of it in one novella.

D81 — two words left unresolved, and named as such. (i) kuoninki (¶248): «kauluksenkohan otatte hameestani ensi vuonna vai kuoninginko» — paired with kaulus "collar" as the next thing the tax men might take off her frock, so a garment part; not in the standard lexicon in a sense that fits. Rendered "or the hem" — the most probable member of the pair, and flagged. (ii) vantis (¶293): «Vantiksesta hän liikutti kätkyttä» — the thing on a cradle you rock it by. Rendered "by its bow", from the hoop over a Finnish cradle. Both are readings, like ohimovika (D50), and both were confirmed to read the same in the 1886 first edition, so neither is a corruption to be argued away.

D82 — three transparent renderings, on V8's standing strategy. pellolle ajaa (¶273) → "drive us out into the field", not "turn us out of doors": the Finnish eviction idiom puts the family in a field and the English idiom puts them at a door, and the field is the harder image and the true one. tilalliset (¶253) → "the farm-owners", not "the farmers" (too broad) and not "the yeomen" (an English rank). tehdä huoneita in a child's play (¶279) → "build houses", against the terminology table's huone = "the room", because what Ville is being sent to build out of wood-chips in the yard is not a room.

D83 — paragraph integrity, fourth span. 89 source paragraphs → 89 English paragraphs, boundaries the source's, no split at dialogue. V5 holds. 1,800 Finnish → 2,747 English words, factor 1.526 (span 1: 1.50; span 2: 1.55; span 3: 1.548). Four spans in, 7,172 Finnish words are translated — 53% of the novella — at a settled factor of 1.53, and the eight-span projection declared at step 1 stands.

Span 5 — D84–D97

Frozen 2026-08-04, before the Swedish comparator was opened and before the study limb of RS-20260804e was designed. This is the first span translated from the 1886 first edition (V21): the copy-text was settled before a word was written rather than after, which is what D65 intended when it made the policy.

D84 — twelve divergences in 2,041 words, and what was done with each. The 1917 text spans 1–4 used and the 1886 first edition differ at twelve places in ¶296–375 that survive OCR filtering. Eleven were adjudicated against the page scan (scan pp. 51, 55, 56, 58, 59) and are applied in ../span-5-source.txt; one — ¶296 tyyneesti/tyynesti — was left on the 1917 reading and is recorded as unadjudicated, because the same word reads tyyneesti in both witnesses at ¶373 and ¶374 and the isolated divergence is as likely to be OCR as setting. Five of the eleven are phonological or orthographic and change no English word: laattialta/lattialta (¶309), laattialle (¶330), laattialla (¶362), raappaisi/raapaisi (¶309), hämärä valo/hämärävalo (¶316). Three change a word: D85, D86, D87. Three are small and taken silently: pudisti/pudisteli (¶318), tarkkasi/tarkasti (¶351), Senvuoksi/Sen vuoksi (¶336).

D85 — «Ei» at ¶320 and «En» at ¶348, and the first place in this book where V3's syntax clause actually pays. Holpainen asks «Oletko sinä kipeä?» twice, forty lines apart. In the first edition Mari answers «Ei.» the first time and «En.» the second. Standard Finnish requires the person-marked En to a second-person question; the invariant Ei is the colloquial/eastern form. The 1917 reprint prints En at both. The two sites are not alike in the story: at ¶320 she is still inside the fit, at ¶348 she has come back to herself and is lying about her state on purpose. Whether the difference is Canth's or a compositor's cannot be settled from anything this project can reach, and no claim is made about it; what is settled is that the copy-text has two forms where the reprint has one. English has a carrier and it is taken: ¶320 reads a bare "No." and ¶348 reads "I'm not." — the fuller, person-marked answer for the lucid one. V3 declares the eastern layer a loss "carried by syntax and idiom only"; four spans produced no site where the syntax actually carried anything. This is one, and it exists only because the collation ran first.

D86 — ¶344, the reading that changes what the sentence is about. The 1917 text reads «Mutta sitä ei hän mielellään ilmoittaisi» — she would not willingly tell it. The first edition reads «miehelleen» — she would not tell it to her man (scan p. 56, read off the image). The whole paragraph is about concealment from Holpainen specifically, and he is at that moment lying awake watching her. The reprint's reading is a corruption and a damaging one: it turns a decision about a person into a vague adverb of manner. Rendered "But that she would not let her man know" — mies kept as "her man" under V19, not "her husband".

D87 — two words the reprint has that the first edition does not. ¶339 W1 reads «Tuo äskeinen kamala aavistus»; the first edition reads «Tuo kamala aavistus» (scan p. 58). ¶336 W1 reads «Tässä hänen mielensä taaskin meni sekaisin»; the first edition reads «Tästä» — from this, causal, not here, locative. Both first-edition readings taken: "That dreadful foreboding" and "At this her mind went astray again". Recorded because §3 of ../collation.md had described the reprint's hand as one that removes; over 7,400 collated words it also adds — ¶105's alkaapäin and ¶339's äskeinen — and the description has been corrected.

D88 — the zero person finds a subjectless English form, in the fourth span that has looked for one. «Täytyi olla hiljaa ... hiljaa...» is a necessive with no subject at all, and it is this span's refrain: four occurrences (¶359 ×2, ¶360, ¶363), plus «Ja pitää silmät kiinni» at ¶361. V15 renders the zero person with a class-matched generic — "a body", "a man" — which adds a subject English does not need here. The bare imperative is subjectless in English too, and it is taken: "Keep still ... keep still..." and "And keep the eyes shut." The generic is still used where the zero person is genuinely propositional — ¶296 "A body must be content with her portion", ¶299 "take the life out of a body at one stroke", ¶333 "If a body could get a little sleep". V15 is not amended: it was never wrong, it was incomplete. What is added is that a zero-person command to oneself has an exact English form and does not need the generic. Running zero-person count: span 1 = 2, span 2 = 8, span 3 = 7, span 4 = 16 (D79), span 5 = 8 (¶296, ¶299 ×2, ¶333, ¶359 ×2, ¶361, ¶363), running total 41.

D89 — «tuuditti uskoa»: D17's standing textual suspicion is discharged, and by the text rather than by a witness. D17 (span 1, ¶31) flagged tuuditti uskoa as not idiomatic and offered two readings: (a) a typesetter's or OCR slip for uskollisesti, or (b) an elliptical rocked on trustingly. It was referred to the second-witness check. The phrase recurs at ¶374 — «Mari tuuditti uskoa, tasaisesti ja tyyneesti» — and both occurrences stand in both printings, twenty-five printed pages apart (1886 pp. 12 and 64; verified in the scan's text layer, two hits, no others). A slip does not happen twice in the same collocation in two independent settings. Reading (a) is refuted. The 1886 context also argues for (b): the two adverbs that follow, evenly and quietly, gloss it as a manner of persisting. D17's rendering "rocked away faithfully" is kept at both sites, now for a reason rather than as a hedge.

D90 — «Ähä kutti» (¶353). A children's taunt — roughly yah, that's what you get — spoken silently by a woman in a psychotic episode, gloating at the spirits because they are afraid of her husband. The register clash is the whole point of the sentence and any smoothing destroys it. Options: a modern schoolyard taunt (anachronistic under V1); a dialect-marked English taunt (closed by V3); a neutral gloss such as serves them right (kills the clash by making it narration). Taken: "Yah, serve you right" — a period English child's taunt, second-person, left inside the free indirect discourse without a tag, exactly as Canth leaves it.

D91 — «Tuhma pökkelö» and «huonommista ihmisistä» (¶357). pökkelö is a rotten stump; the insult is Mari's, of her husband, in free indirect discourse and without a tag. "The stupid blockhead" — "blockhead" keeps the wood and is period-plain. huonommat ihmiset is a class term, not a moral one: "the meaner sort of people", not worse people, which would make Mari's complaint about virtue instead of about rank.

D92 — four institutions in one paragraph, and the D10 calque strategy holds for three of them. ¶297 köyhäinhuone → "the poorhouse"; ¶299 hoitohuone → "her almshouse" — two source words for one destination, two English words, matched as liiteri/puuliiteri and täkki/peite were; ¶334 vaivaishoito → "the poor relief" (V9 records the vaivainen pauper sense as lost each time, and this is where the noun behind it surfaces); ¶334 porttohuoneissa → "in the bawdy-houses". Canth's word is portto, whore, and is blunt; brothel is the flatter modern word and was refused for that reason.

D93 — «Eihän se Mari» (¶366): the free-indirect marker that has no English morpheme. Holpainen's long interior stretch is marked in Finnish by the clitic -hän and by se before a name — the spoken, unmarked determiner. V22 forbids rendering se of a person as "it"; here the problem is the opposite, because English has no unstressed determiner before a name at all. The clitic is carried by a sentence-initial "Why," — "Why, Mari had not eaten that soup at dinner either" — and se is dropped. This is a declared loss of one of the two devices that tell a Finnish reader whose mind a paragraph is in, and it is the loss the study limb of this session was designed around.

D94 — lamppu and kitupiikki (¶309, ¶316, ¶330). One referent, the mean little tin lamp of D71, and Canth uses two words within twenty lines. Matched: "the lamp" where she writes lamppua, "the skinflint" where she writes kitupiikin. Same rule as D92's pair; the alternative — one English word throughout — would tidy a variation the source makes.

D95 — the eastern layer in this span, counted and not carried. Elä for standard älä (4), vaan for vain (14), kumminkin for kuitenkin (4), laattia for lattia (3), and one token each of vajoovinaan, pujoi, puhkumalla, kauvan, raappaisi, ilkiäisi, pelvon — 32 tokens in 2,041 words, none rendered as English dialect, per V3. The declared loss is bigger in this span than the count in any earlier one, and the reason is the subject matter: the whole span is inside two heads, so almost all of it is in the characters' own idiom rather than the narrator's.

D96 — ¶365, a generic where V15 and V20 both fall short, and no rule is written for it. «Ylellisestä uupumuksestakin voi heikko ihminen pian mennä sekaisin» sits inside Holpainen's free indirect discourse and is about Mari. V15 gives a plain male speaker "a man"; V20 gender-matches the generic where the speaker is inside it, and Holpainen is not — he is thinking about his wife. Neither clause fits. Taken: "A weak creature might soon go astray from sheer overtiredness" — ungendered, plain, period. No rule is written, per V17: one site is not a rule, and the next span may supply the case that decides it.

D97 — the second-person census, against the V23 grid rather than freshly, as register.md §Unresolved 2 requires. Chapter II was the declared exposure: a te between intimates there falsifies V23. Span 5 contains 17 utterances carrying second-person forms — ¶301, 308, 310, 312, 313, 317, 319, 323, 338, 340, 342, 346, 347, 349, 354, 358, 370 — and every form in all seventeen is T-singular: sinä and its cases, the -tko/-tkö interrogative, and the plain 2sg imperative (Kuule, Pane, Siunaa, Menepäs, Elä). There is not one te form in the span. Sixteen of the seventeen are between husband and wife, the most intimate adult pair in the book; the seventeenth is Mari to God at ¶301 («Elä minua hylkää»), which is a cell the novella had not previously supplied and which is also T-singular. V23 is not falsified here and gains its intimate-adult cell. ¶296–375 is 15% of the novella; ¶376–573 remains, and the exposure stays open until it is read.

D98 — paragraph integrity, fifth span. 80 source paragraphs → 80 English paragraphs, boundaries the source's, no split at dialogue. V5 holds. 2,041 Finnish → 2,982 English words, factor 1.461 — the lowest of the five spans (1.50, 1.55, 1.548, 1.526). The span is almost all interior monologue and two-word dialogue turns, where English needs no unpacking of participial chains; the factor is a fact about what kind of prose a span is, not a drift in method. Five spans in, 9,213 Finnish words are translated — 68% of the novella.

Span 6 — D99–D112

Frozen 2026-08-05, before the Swedish comparator was opened and before the study limb of this session was designed. The second span translated from the copy-text rather than collated after (V21), and the first for which the copy-text of the whole remaining novella was settled first.

D99 — the gate: ¶376–572 collated, and thirteen readings changed inside this span. register.md §Unresolved 1 required the last unchecked stretch — 4,308 Finnish words, 32% of the novella — collated against the 1886 first edition before any new prose. Method as ../collation.md §3 and §7: word-level diff of the 1917 text against the first edition's own text layer, every surviving row adjudicated against the page scan, pure OCR noise excluded. The diff was run over ¶375–572 with ¶375 as the alignment anchor: 4,347 W1 words against 4,338 W4 words, 97.9% aligned; 68 rows survive, 51 of them beyond diacritic and letter-doubling noise, and 23 are real print divergences. Full record: ../collation.md §10. Thirteen readings fall inside ¶376–441 and are applied in ../span-6-source.txt: ¶387 olisi (D107), ¶387 kuivanut, ¶387 sillin päitä, ¶392 piippunysää, ¶404 jalastaan, ¶407 herra and kumminkin, ¶409 herra×2 / herran, ¶413 pitä, ¶420 myrtin-oksista and kuuletteko (D102), ¶423 pään aluista, ¶437 niinpian. Sixteen of the sixty-eight rows dissolved on the image — Heilu for Hellu thirteen times, VVialen for Wialén, oh for oli, knmminkin for kumminkin — which is the fourth collation running in which the mechanical diff has been a finding aid and nothing more.

D100 — the copy-text prints the poor people's word for God in lower case, and the translation still writes "the Lord". A whole-novella census, and a reading refused on it. The 1886 first edition reads «herra antoi, herra otti, herran nimi kiitetty olkoon» at ¶409 and «ettei herra tulisi korjaamaan» — ¶407; the 1917 reprint capitalises all four. Because this book's own word for the class above these people is herrat — "the gentry" (D68) — the lower case looked like a voice device: the poor saying lord with the same undifferentiated word they use for the men who own their house. The census refutes it. Across the whole novella the first edition sets Jumala with a capital at 31 of 31 tokens and herra mixed; of the ten God-sense herra tokens that are not sentence-initial and not part of «Herra Jumala», eight are lower case and two are capital — and both of those are inside a poor character's free indirect discourse as well («ellei Herra armosta heitä pelastaisi»; «kaikki Herran huostaan»). The split does not fall on who is speaking, so it is a compositor's inconsistency and not Canth's marking, and a translation that made an English reader hear lord/master at ¶409 would be inventing a device the copy-text does not have. "The Lord" is kept. A case-sensitive comparison of the two printings over the whole work returns only six divine-word divergences — ¶294 luoja/Luoja, ¶306 herraa/Herraa, and the four here — so nothing already translated is disturbed. The reason this is recorded rather than dropped: the census was run because the reading was attractive, and it is the reading that lost.

D101 — ¶389, and V18a's fourth and last site falls in this span. «Äiti, kuulkaa, menenkös taas kaupungille leipää pyytämään?» is the fourth and final honorific-plural-to-a-parent in the novella (D78's whole-text count: ¶67, ¶103, ¶175, ¶389). V18a mandates plain and this is plain: "Mother, listen, shall I go into the town again and ask for bread?" No compensation is attempted; the kin term is again supplied by Canth herself in the same breath («Äiti»), which is the occupied slot D57 found at ¶175. The loss is now complete and countable: four sites in 13,525 words, all one child to one mother, all translated plain, one of them (¶175) marked, measured and un-marked in a single session. The register's honorific question is closed.

D102 — ¶418 to ¶420, the switch English cannot see. Mari, breaking into speech over the dead child, says «Kuuletko, että ei toisten kanssa yhteen» to Holpainen alone (¶418) and then, two speeches later, «Niin, kuuletteko, sertinkipaita ja kukka» (¶420) — T-singular to one man, then 2PL to the two people in the room, because Tiina Katri has come in. The copy-text's present tense is what makes the pair legible; the 1917 reprint reads kuulitteko, a past tense, which turns a second insistence into a backward glance. English has one "you" and both sentences read "do you hear". The widening of the address — she stops instructing her husband and starts instructing the room — is carried in English only by what is around it: Tiina Katri ja Holpainen katsoivat toisiinsa in the next paragraph. Declared loss, and the first place in this book where the te/sinä line does dramatic rather than social work.

D103 — the second-person grid of the whole novella, and V23 gets the distinction it was missing. register.md §Unresolved 2 made ¶376–572 V23's exposure: a te between intimates there falsifies it. It is not falsified, and the span supplies something better than a null. Tiina Katri is a within-speaker control. In this one household on this one day she says sinä to Mari (¶412 «Mene levolle», ¶423 «Pane pitkällesi … Olethan … sinulle», ¶425 «Elä puhu … väsyttää sinua») and te to Holpainen (¶382 «Menkää sisään nyt», ¶429 «Lähtekää pois») — and Holpainen returns the te (¶379 «Ette luule sitten», ¶383 «tulkaa pian lohduttamaan»), while Mari returns the sinä (¶284 «aina sinä olet hyvä meitä kohtaan»). Same speaker, same room, same hour, same class, equally well acquainted; the form is mutual within each pair and different between them. Across the whole work the single-addressee te pairs are: Mari ↔ Heikura the landlord (¶80–99, eight events), Mari ↔ Hanna the servant girl (¶122–132), Mari ↔ the beggar-woman on the road (¶135–148), Tiina Katri ↔ Holpainen (¶382, ¶383, ¶429), the doctor, pastor and carer downward to the poor (¶443, ¶451, ¶460, ¶529), Heikura upward to the doctor (¶453), pastor ↔ doctor between themselves (¶474–488), and an old pauper woman to Tiina Katri (¶538). The single-addressee sinä pairs are Mari ↔ Holpainen (span 5, sixteen events), Mari ↔ Tiina Katri, mother ↔ children, and Mari to God (¶301). So te is not non-intimacy, which is what V23 called it — Tiina Katri is as intimate with this family as anyone in the book, washes the corpse and lays out the mother. It is non-kinship, with one exception, and the exception is a woman-to-woman friendship. What this book cannot separate is whether the operative line is gender or the friendship itself, because Tiina Katri is close to Mari and not to Holpainen; the two are confounded and neither is claimed. V23's renderings are unchanged and its gloss is: te marks a relation outside the family, sinä a relation inside it or standing in for it. ¶151 is the number reading in one breath — the beggar-woman says «Minkä minä teille voin, jos eksytte … Pysykää nyt lähellä» to two children and then «Sinä, Sere, ota minua hameesta kiinni» to one.

D104 — the burial vocabulary: three words, two calques and one refusal. kirstu (¶413, ¶415, ¶424 ×3) is chest, not the standard arkku; it is the poor people's word for a coffin and "coffin" is taken, with the chest sense recorded as lost — period English "shell" for a plain deal coffin was refused as trade vocabulary a mother would not use of her own child. sertinki (¶415, ¶420 ×2) is the Swedish sirting, a plain cotton cloth: "shirting", the transparent calque, D10's strategy again. ranssi (¶420 ×2) is the Swedish frans, a fringe, and it is fringe-work of myrtle sprigs laid at the head; chaplet and garland were both refused because they are the words for the thing done properly, and Mari is dictating the funeral of a pauper child she cannot pay for. "A fringe of myrtle sprigs" keeps the plainness and the strangeness together.

D105 — pappi and pastori, matched. Holpainen shouts «Pappia, pappia!» (¶437) and Tiina Katri runs «Ensin papin luokse» (¶439); the narrator writes «Pastori kuitenkin joutui ennen perille» (¶440) and «sanoi pastori» (¶441). One clergyman, two source words, and the same matched-pair rule as liiteri/puuliiteri, täkki/peite, lamppu/kitupiikki and köyhäinhuone/hoitohuone: "the parson" where Canth writes pappi, "the pastor" where she writes pastori. The split is not decorative — pappi is what the family shouts for and pastori is what the narrator calls the man who arrives.

D106 — «meitä huonoja» (¶383), and a class adjective goes into the word for poverty. D91 fixed huonommat ihmiset as "the meaner sort of people", a class term and not a moral one. Holpainen here thanks Tiina Katri and asks her to «tulkaa pian lohduttamaan taas meitä huonoja» — the same adjective in the positive degree, of himself and his household. "Us of the meaner sort" is not a sentence a man says while thanking his neighbour over a dying child, and "us poor folk" is taken, which spends köyhä's English word on huono. Declared loss of a distinction the book keeps elsewhere, recorded here rather than smoothed. What makes it a loss and not a slip is that the distinction survives in narration (D91) and dies in a mouth: the register's rule was written from a narrator's sentence and has no purchase on how a man thanks a neighbour.

D107 — ¶387's conditional, which exists only because the collation ran first. The 1917 text reads «Mitäpä hänellä oli sanottavaa?»; the first edition reads «olisi» (scan p. 64). The paragraph is Mari's free indirect discourse looking at her own silence, and the difference is the whole difference between a narrator reporting that she had nothing to say and Mari asking herself what she would say. "And what would she have to say? Nothing, nothing at all." The same paragraph's «suu oli kuivanut umpeen» (for the reprint's kuivunut) changes nothing in English — "her mouth had dried shut" renders either — and is recorded so that the adjudicated set is not overstated.

D108 — ¶401, «juuri kuin hakijaa odottaen». hakija is the one who fetches, and the dying child is looking at the ceiling as if waiting for him. English has no noun for it that is not either theological (a summoner) or bureaucratic (a collector). Taken: "just as if she were waiting for the one who comes to fetch" — the relative clause carries what the Finnish agent noun carries, at the cost of five words for one. In the same paragraph harvaan (¶401) and harvempaan (¶406) are about spacing, not speed — moans and breaths at longer and longer intervals — and English "slowly" / "more slowly" covers both meanings and specifies neither. Matched pair, declared loss.

D109 — ¶435, the sentence the span exists for. «Mölisevää se oli, syvää ja karkeata, ei ihmisen valitusta eikä eläimen ulvontaa, mutta kumpaakin yhdessä, ja lisäksi vielä jotain muuta, kamalaa ja kauheata.» Four partitive predicates in a row with no subject repeated, fronted — the Finnish sentence names the sound before it names anything else, and never once says scream. The fronting is kept — "Bellowing it was, deep and rough" — and the partitive chain is kept as a chain, because the alternative (an English relative clause, a sound that was...) puts a noun back at the head of the sentence that Canth has deliberately withheld. kamala and kauhea are near-synonyms and are rendered "ghastly and terrible"; the doubling is not padding in the source and is not smoothed here.

D110 — the eastern layer in this span, counted and not carried. elä/elkää for älä/älkää (2), vaan for vain (5), kumminkin/kumminkaan for kuitenkin (3), pelj- for pel- (3), eroitt- for erott- (2), the -kos/-s clitics (3), and one token each of sitä paitse, aventoon, tänlainen, vaihettanut, hapeasti, ihven, pahimmasti, plus ohkaili/ohkauksia (2) — 27 tokens in 1,733 copy-text words, none rendered as English dialect, per V3. The rate is 1.56% against span 5's 1.57%, and one of the twenty-seven exists only because of the copy-text: ¶407's kumminkin, which the reprint had already standardised to kuitenkin before the translator saw it. It is carried, as V3 says the layer is carried, by idiom alone — "it felt so hard now, all the same".

D111 — the zero person, and the lowest count of any span. Span 6 = 2: ¶376 «eihän niitä mielellään tahtoisi antaa kumminkaan», rendered with V20's gender-matched generic — "a body wouldn't willingly give them up for all that", Tiina Katri being a plain woman inside her own statement — and ¶426 «koetettiin olla hiljaa», a passive that forces an English subject: "they tried to keep quiet". Two borderlines are listed and deliberately uncounted, on D61's precedent: ¶378's «Oli kai niin lävitse uupunut», where the subject is recoverable and the English keeps the source's subjectless opening ("Worn clean through, I dare say she was"), and ¶402's impersonal «näkyi, että hän itki» ("it could be seen that she was crying"). Running total: span 1 = 2, span 2 = 8, span 3 = 7, span 4 = 16, span 5 = 8, span 6 = 2 — 43. The count is a fact about what kind of prose a span is: this one is third-person narration with a named subject and short dialogue turns, and it has almost no room for the construction. V24's bare imperative found no site here at all, and no rule is stretched to cover one (§Unresolved 3 asked whether a zero person that is neither a command nor propositional would turn up; none did).

D112 — paragraph integrity, sixth span. 66 source paragraphs → 66 English paragraphs, boundaries the copy-text's, no split at dialogue. V5 holds. 1,732 Finnish words in the working text (1,733 in the copy-text, which splits two compounds and joins one) → 2,516 English words, factor 1.452 — the lowest of the six (1.50, 1.55, 1.548, 1.526, 1.461), and the reason is the same as span 5's: the span is short dialogue turns and interior narration, where English has no participial chains to unpack. Six spans in, 10,945 Finnish words are translated — 80.9% of the novella. ¶442–572 remain, 2,576 words, and they are collated and waiting.

Span 7 — D113–D128

Frozen 2026-08-05, before the Swedish comparator was opened and before the study limb of this session was designed. The last span. Translated from the copy-text (V21), on a stretch collated in full at span 6, so no gate was owed on the text and none was run.

D113 — eight spans declared, seven translated, and the remainder taken whole. The step-1 plan cut the novella into eight spans of ~1,700 Finnish words and declared the overrun against the arm's 4–6 norm rather than discovering it late. Span 7 takes ¶442–572 entire, 2,572 copy-text words, which is 26% above the largest previous span (2,041, span 5). Two reasons, both stated before a word was translated. (i) No gate. Spans 4, 5 and 6 each opened with a collation that consumed a large part of the session — half of S105 by that session's own account — and span 6 finished the novella's collation, so this span begins on settled text. (ii) The cadence. This arm's declared cadence is one visit every three sessions and it has been overrun on every one of its six visits (S085, S090, S095, S100, S105, S110 — a five-session rhythm against a declared three). An eighth span at that rhythm is another five sessions for 1,600 words. The remainder is taken now and step 8 becomes the craft report alone. This is a revision of the declared plan, not a discovery that it had already been broken, which is the distinction the arm's budget rule exists to force.

D114 — the ten copy-text readings applied here, and what the reprint's smoothing would have cost at the three that reach English. ../collation.md §10 adjudicated ¶376–572 against the 1886 first edition; ten of its rows fall in ¶442–572 and are applied in ../span-7-source.txt before translation: ¶473 hengeltä, ¶490 Heiskasen, ¶502 (single «Ei saa sitoa»), ¶519 jossa, ¶528 ammoitti, ¶536 ensimäisenä, ¶538 (no ja), ¶549 (no niin,; silmiin.), ¶553 pilkkoisten, ¶554 Aamuisilla … jo. Seven change no English word. Three do, and register.md §Unresolved 4 named two of them in advance: - ¶502. The copy-text has Mari say «Ei saa sitoa, kyllä minä olen hiljaa» once; the reprint doubles the plea. Rendered "Mustn't tie, I'll be quiet, indeed I will." The doubling would have made her madder than the copy-text has her: in the first edition she asks once and then obeys, and the obedience is the point of the paragraph that follows. This is the clearest characterisation difference the collation produced anywhere in the novella. - ¶549. The copy-text runs «vaikka mitä, vaikka umpisokeaksikin»; the reprint inserts niin,. Rendered "and whatever came, though she went stone blind." The reprint's addition would have put a breath into Hellu's free indirect thought — and whatever came, yes, though she went stone blind — where the copy-text has the list run on flat. A smoothing of rhythm inside a child's mind. - ¶554. The copy-text reads «Aamuisilla hän oli jo poissa, kun he unestaan heräsivät». Rendered "Of a morning he was gone already when they woke out of their sleep." Without jo the two clauses are simultaneous; with it, his leaving precedes their waking, which is the whole content of the sentence. The reprint's deletion costs the relation between the two times. - ¶538, the third named site, is the one that costs nothing in this target, and it is recorded because it was expected to cost something. The copy-text's asyndeton «joka hyvänsä pahansa teki alleen» is carried appositively — "that did his good, his bad, under him" — and the reprint's ja would have given "his good and his bad", which is the same information at the same register. English has the asyndetic pair, so the smoothing is recoverable here and only here of the four.

D115 — ¶449 «Kan hon botas?» stays Swedish, unglossed and unitalicised, and the reader is moved. V26. At the deathbed the pastor asks the doctor, in Swedish, whether the woman can be cured, and gets no answer. Canth does not gloss it, does not narrate it, and does not mark it typographically — it sits in the same guillemets as every other line in the book. Eight paragraphs later she does narrate a second switch («vaihtoivat muutaman sanan ruotsiksi», ¶457), so the book supplies the key after the lock. Three options were live: (a) keep the Swedish bare; (b) English it; (c) keep it and add in Swedish to the tag. (a) is taken, and set in the same double quotes as everything else, because italics or a tag would be the translator telling the reader this is foreign, which the source's own typography refuses to do. (b) is the tempting one and it deletes the book's sharpest class device at its most loaded moment: two gentlemen discussing over a bound woman's body, in the language her household does not have, whether she is worth curing. The cost is real and is not a loss of information — it is a change of seat. Canth's 1886 reader was a literate Finn who could read that line; the switch placed that reader with the gentlemen and Mari's family outside it. An English reader in 2026 cannot read it, and is placed with Mari. The device survives; the reader's position inside it inverts. RS-20260802d found English better placed than Swedish to carry this book's code-switching, on the narrated case at ¶130 — Hertzberg's Swedish loses the structure there because in his target the marked language is the medium. The printed case at ¶449 is the harder one and this log does not claim it comes out the same way. That is what this session's study limb was designed to measure, and the design was written after this decision was frozen.

D116 — ¶458, the third-person address running downward, and the one place in the novella where English has the better instrument. «Tahtooko Holpainen viedä vaimonsa Harjulaan?» — the pastor addresses a man standing in front of him in the third person by name. V13 was written for this grammar running upward (Mari to the lady) and declares it an English loss: kept in argument position it re-reads as a third party. Here the same grammar runs downward across the class line, and it is not deference but correctness at a distance — the pastor declining to sinä a poor man and declining to give him a te. Rendered "Will you take your wife out to Harjula, Holpainen?": second person plus the bare surname, which is exactly how an English clergyman of 1886 addresses a labouring man, and which does the same distancing work by a different mechanism. This is a carry, not a compensation, and not a loss — the only one V13's family has produced in seven spans. It works because English marks this relation in its vocative system where Finnish marks it in its person system, so there is something to trade. Recorded, and V13 is not amended: its site was the upward one and it was right about it.

D117 — V1 on educated speech, and the answer to register.md §Unresolved 2 is that V1 is under-specified, not too narrow. V27. The pastor–doctor argument (¶463–488) is the novella's thesis and the first extended educated speech in the book: a socialist physician arguing for redistribution and for euthanasia against a Lutheran pastor defending providence, in complete subordinating clauses with abstract vocabulary — sallimus, johdonmukainen, armonaika, terveydenhoito. V1 binds the translation to period-idiomatic English of roughly the source's own decade, at its plain end, and its illustrative list — right enough, not a rap, the minute I get to a baking — is poor people's idiom and reaches none of this. The test applied was V1's prohibition, not V1's examples. What V1 forbids is prose that reads as contemporary literary fiction. "By that reckoning it would be wrong to cure the sick at all" and "purge your religion; that doctrine won't do any longer for the people of the present day" are period and are not that. So V1's period clause is the binding one and its plain-end clause is speaker-indexed — a description of who was speaking in spans 1–6, not a property of the translation. The rule is stated rather than quietly widened, which is what §Unresolved 2 required. V1 is not amended; V27 states its scope. This is the third register rule found under-specified in the same way — V15 by V24, V23 by V25, now V1 by V27 — and each was found out by a referent the rule had never been tested against, which goes to the craft report.

D118 — V16's diagnostic does not survive the educated speakers, and V16's instruction does. V16 reads: colloquial particles and clitics mark everyone except the merchant class, realised in English as contractions for everyone and uncontracted verbs for the one commercial speaker (D40). The doctor and the pastor have the clitics — Johan, sehän, -kaan, -kin, Juljetaanpa, Jopa — at a density no lower than Heikura's. Applied literally, V16 gives them contractions, and they have them: "There's plenty of it in the world", "that's another matter altogether", "we can't know". So the clitic is not the class marker V16 took it for. What separates these two men from everyone else in the book is clause length, subordination and abstract vocabulary, and English carries all three without a rule. V16 stands unamended as an instruction and is withdrawn as a description; the merchant's wife remains the only uncontracted speaker in the novella, and she is uncontracted because her Finnish is uncontracted, not because of her class.

D119 — the address grid, completed at the last span, and V25 is falsified by it. V28. V23 called te the non-intimate form; V25 corrected that to non-kinship on the within-speaker control span 6 supplied (Tiina Katri says sinä to Mari and te to Holpainen, one household, one day, both mutual). Span 7 supplies a second within-speaker control that breaks it. Heiskanen — the neighbour, same class, no kin to either — says sinä to Holpainen (¶491, «Sinulle tulee vaikea yö») and sinä to Tiina Katri (¶540, «Tule pois, kah, mitä sinä turhia»). Tiina Katri and Holpainen te each other. So the same two people take te from one another and sinä from a third neighbour, and neither kinship, nor gender, nor class, nor acquaintance separates the two cases. The whole-book grid, all seven spans, single-addressee adult events only (plural-by-number events excluded throughout — ¶500, ¶504, ¶510, ¶522, ¶529, ¶533, ¶567 are all addressed to two or more people and are not evidence):

Four of the five cells are determined by the situation. The fifth is determined by who is speaking: Heiskanen sinäs everyone he knows, Holpainen and Tiina Katri te each other, the young quarrymen sinä Holpainen and he sinäs them back (¶558–¶568, mutual T between men who have not been introduced). V23 and V25 were both looking for a rule in the one cell that does not have one. And this is where the translation consequence lands. English carries none of the system at any site, which the register has declared since V13. But the four determined cells are recoverable by an English reader from the scene itself — who is kin, who is a stranger, who is gentry — so what is actually lost is only the fifth: the cell that varies by speaker, which is the one carrying characterisation rather than situation. What English loses in this book's address system is precisely the part that is character.

D120 — the zero person has a third class, it is the doctor's, and §Settled-6 item 3's carried question is answered by ¶484. V15 renders the zero person with a class-matched English generic; V24 added that a zero person which is a command to oneself takes the bare imperative instead. The register asked what happens if a span supplies one that is neither. ¶484 supplies four in a single paragraph — «kun sotia julistetaan», «silloin saa tappaa ja runnella», «Juljetaanpa vielä päälliseksi rukoilla», «varoitetaan rakastamaan», «Ei ajatella» — and they are not generic at all. They are agent suppression: the doctor's indictment of war never once names who declares it, who is permitted to kill, who prays for the blessing, who does the warning. Rendered with English passives and dummy subjects — "when wars are declared", "it's permitted then to kill and mangle", "There's the effrontery besides to pray", "the people are warned to love their neighbour", "It isn't considered" — and never with V15's generic, which would put a man or one where the source has deliberately put nobody. V15 and V24 are both left standing and V15's domain is narrowed to the genuinely propositional zero person. The highest zero-person density in the novella belongs to the educated speaker, and it is doing the opposite work from everyone else's.

D121 — ¶541 is D96's deciding site, and the answer was in the previous sentence. §Settled-6 item 4 carried an unresolved case from ¶365: a zero person where the speaker stands outside the implied agent and the referent inside, which V15 and V20 both fail. Tiina Katri at ¶541: «Antaisi poloisille edes puhdasta ilmaa» — a subjectless conditional reproaching an unnamed responsible party she is plainly not part of. Rendered "They might give the poor creatures clean air at least". The English "they" is not invented: the source supplies ne in the immediately preceding sentence («Mitäs ne pitävät ihmisiä semmoisessa katkussa»), so the reproach already has its indefinite agent on the page and the zero person is anaphoric to it. A reproaching zero person takes English indefinite "they", never the generic, and no rule is written because there is no further span to bind — this is recorded as the answer to a question the register asked, and it belongs in the craft report.

D122 — vyö and the swaddling-bands: one English word carries three occurrences and the horror is left where Canth left it. The doctor asks for «pari vyötä, tai jotain semmoista» (¶443); Tiina Katri finds «Annin kapalovöitä» (¶444) and the baby's swaddling-bands are used to tie the mother's hands behind her back; Holpainen threatens Mari on the road with «meillä on vyöt mukana» (¶506); and at the almshouse the children's wetted «riepuja ja vöitä» hang on lines in both rooms (¶525). Rendered "bands" at all four, with kapalovyö as "swaddling-bands" (the term was fixed at span 6). Canth never points at the connection, and no English word was chosen to point at it either — "straps" at ¶443 would have been more natural and would have cut the thread. suolivyö at ¶550, the waistband of Petu's new trousers, contains the same root and is not part of the figure; it takes "waist" and the accidental echo is dropped.

D123 — the four rings back to the opening, kept word for word. The last span closes four figures the first span opened, and each was checked against the frozen English rather than re-translated. (i) ¶3 «Mustaan pimeyteen Mari jäi» → "In the black dark Mari was left"; ¶528 «Musta pimeys ammoitti heille vastaan» → "A black dark gaped at them." (ii) ¶4 «Huone tuntui kolkolta» → "The room felt bleak"; ¶547 «Tyhjältä ja kolkolta tuntui Holpaisen huone» → "Empty and bleak Holpainen's room felt the next day." (iii) ¶3 «koetti niellä karvaan palan kurkustaan» → "tried to swallow down the bitter lump in her throat", recurring once in chapter I for Mari; ¶549 has Hellu drinking water «että sai karvaan palan kurkustaan painumaan» → "to get the bitter lump in her throat to go down" — the third occurrence, and the daughter inherits the mother's gesture. (iv) span 4's «kahdeksankymmentä penniä päiväpalkaksi», the wage five people speculate about on a bare floor in chapter I, is the wage Holpainen is earning at ¶566, and both read "eighty pennies". A fifth holds inside this span: ¶510's «Mitäs te sillä tiedolla teette» and ¶556's «mutta mitäpä hän sillä tiedolla teki» share a phrase and share "what do you do with the knowing of it" / "what did he do with the knowing of it". The register has no rule for any of this; it is what a span-by-span log cannot see and a whole work can.

D124 — pilkkakirves is a declared loss, and it is the second broken pun in the novella. ¶557: the men breaking stone above Holpainen «olivat nuoria kaikki ja suuria pilkkakirveitä» — literally great mocking-axes, the ordinary Finnish word for a scoffer, and Canth puts it on men who are holding axes. Rendered "great mockers". English has no scoffer-word containing a tool, and manufacturing one ("rare hands with a jeer") would invent a device at a site where the source's is idiomatic and only half-live. Declared, and recorded beside linna (¶293–294, prison / stone castle, D71) as the second pun this translation breaks.

D125 — «Eikö kelpaa rengille rokka?» is an unframed proverb and is rendered flat, which is the opposite of ARM-longwork's finding and for a stated reason. ¶566: a quarryman offers Holpainen stone-crumb to eat and glosses it with a proverb — is soup not good enough for a farm-hand — with no framing of any kind. ARM-longwork closed U6 NOT SETTLED on exactly this class of site in Verga, where guillemets marked some proverbs and not others. Canth's guillemets are simply quotation marks (V6), so the device U6 was about does not exist in this book, and there is nothing to be settled here. The line is rendered as the speaker's own words, "Isn't soup good enough for a farm-hand?", with no as they say and no quotation marks inside the speech: the young man is not citing a proverb, he is jeering with one, and the jeer is what the next clause explains.

D126 — terminology fixed this span, and a fourth declared reading. lupakirja = the order of admission / the order; vaivaishoitokunnan esimies = the chairman of the poor-relief board (on V9's vaivaishoito = the poor relief); hoitolaitos = the institution, a third source word for the destination already carrying "the poorhouse" and "her almshouse" (D92), matched as the policy requires; hoitaja = the keeper; koppi = the box, kept literal because Canth's word is not a cell and the board walls are described; pytinki (< Sw. byggning) = the building, a colloquial loan English cannot mark; kakluuni (< Sw. kakelugn) = the tiled stove, matched against uuni = the stove; kivenmura = stone-crumb, keeping the food joke; särvin = a relish; makuluu = a soup-bone; sarkanuttu = a homespun jacket, on nuttu = jacket; virsta = a verst, transparent per V8; mörkö = the bogey, and the same word twice is load-bearing — the rockers threaten the children with it at ¶524 and the old women tell them at ¶533 that it has come, when what has come is a woman screaming in a box. konttuori (¶571) joins ohimovika (D50), kuoninki and vantis (D81) as a declared reading, not an authority. The children in the poor-house building «käänsivät silmänsä konttuorista pois» — the word is Swedish kontor, an office, and there is no office in the building the scene has described. Both printings read it identically, so it is not a corruption to be argued away. Rendered "turned their eyes away from the office", flat, and flagged here rather than smoothed into "the box".

D127 — ¶458's unbalanced quotation is closed, and ¶228's was not. The copy-text opens the pastor's question with a guillemet and never closes it. D72 established that ¶228's unbalanced quotation is in the first edition too and is therefore Canth's or her compositor's, and left it. This one is closed, because under the declared reading-edition purpose an unclosed quotation is a defect the reader trips on rather than a feature they can use, and because the paragraph that follows is a different speaker. The inconsistency with ¶228 is deliberate: there the unbalanced mark falls at a point where the speaker continues, and the reader loses nothing.

D128 — what the seven spans came to. 20,276 English words from 13,517 Finnish, ¶2–572, 571 source paragraphs to 571 English paragraphs with no split or merge anywhere (V5), factors 1.50, 1.55, 1.548, 1.526, 1.461, 1.452, 1.476. The step-1 projection of ~20,300 was right to 0.1% and its reasoning was wrong: it assumed span 1's 1.50 would hold, and the factor instead rose for two spans and then fell for three, so the error cancelled. The falling factor is not a translator settling down — spans 5, 6 and 7 are the three with the most dialogue and the least description in the novella, and Finnish dialogue expands into English less than Finnish narration does. Running zero-person count: span 1 = 2, span 2 = 8, span 3 = 7, span 4 = 16, span 5 = 8, span 6 = 2, span 7 = 10 — 53 sites in the whole work. Span 7's ten: ¶469, ¶484 ×4 (D120), ¶539, ¶541 (D121), ¶544, ¶546, ¶555. Passives kept as English passives are not counted, on D61's convention.

Errata

Erratum 5 (2026-08-04, spans 1–3) — three sentences change when the already-translated spans are put on the copy-text V21 declared. ¶2–206 had never been collated; register.md §Unresolved 1 made it span 5's first task. Sixteen substantive divergences in 5,372 words, of which three change an English word. Full record: ../collation.md §§7–9.

1. ¶73 — was: "The mother remembered the crust and broke a large piece of it into Hellu's hand." Now: "…and put a large piece of it into Hellu's hand." The 1917 text reads taittoi (broke off); the first edition reads laittoi (put), read off the image at scan p. 17. This is the closest call of the three and is decided by the policy rather than by the sense: the elative siitä sits more naturally with broke off, and if V21 did not exist the 1917 reading would be the attractive one. V21 follows the reprint only where the first edition is a manifest slip, and laittoi siitä suuren kappaleen käteen is construable. The policy was written before this site was known and is applied to it.
2. ¶105 — was: "everything seemed to be going well to begin with." Now: "everything seemed to be going well." The first edition has no word answering to alkaapäin (scan p. 20), and alkaapäin is not a standard Finnish word. The clause the reprint added is a dramatic-irony hinge — things are about to go very wrong — and the English had leaned on it.
3. ¶163 — was: "and did not so much as feel her hunger, nor how little strength was left in her." Now: "and no longer felt even her hunger, nor how little strength was left in her." The first edition reads «eikä tuntenut edes nälkäänsä enää» (scan p. 32); the 1917 text drops the word.

Two renderings the collation vindicated and did not change. ¶102: the 1917 text reads «Soudata nyt hyvin lasta» — an imperative of the causative soudattaa — and the English says "Rock the child well now"; the first edition reads «Souda», the plain imperative, which is what the English already had. ¶134: the 1917 text reads «millä oli raukoilla paha ja vaikea olla», which is not construable, and the translator guessed; the first edition reads «niillä» (scan p. 28), and the guess was right. This is the third demonstrated corruption of the same letter-substitution family in the reprint — with EL at ¶94 and el at ¶197 — and the first one that fell inside a sentence this project had to render.

Erratum 3 (2026-08-03, span 3) — an accuracy error, surfaced by the comparator. Was: ¶146, «jalkaansa on potenut toista vuotta» → "he's had a bad leg on him this two years and more". Now: "he's had a bad leg on him going on two years now". Reason: toista vuotta is into the second year — an interval between one and two years. "Two years and more" claims an interval disjoint from it. The error was found when Hertzberg's Swedish was opened after the freeze (RS-20260803b §7). The witness that caught it is worse at the same site: Hertzberg reads «hans fot har varit sjuk i fem år», five years, which no reading of «toista vuotta» supports. Recorded because a comparator that is wrong can still be right about you.

Erratum 4 (2026-08-03, span 3) — V18 is retired and the compensation at ¶175 is withdrawn. Was: «Nouskaa ylös!» → "Mother, there's ladies here. Please to get up!" (from D57). Now: "Mother, there's ladies here. Get up!" Reason: not that the device failed — it worked. E-20260803b put the two versions blind to three seats with one string varying: the marked line moved the girl's standing rating by +1.167 (exact permutation p = 0.0368), all three seats moved the same way, five of six cells quoted "Please to get up!" as the marker, and the mother's direction did not move. What fired was C4, the naturalness tripwire: the marked line reads 0.833 less like a nine-year-old than the plain one, against a tolerance of 0.50 frozen before any call. The design's decision table makes row 1 unconditional on the recovery result, and row 1 governs. On the raw scale the device gains more than it costs (1.167 against 0.833) and is withdrawn anyway, because the frozen rule prices a naturalness defect at half the weight of a recovered marking. That price was set in advance and is not renegotiated now that it has cost something. What does NOT change: D57's account of the site stands, and so does its finding — the kin term was unavailable because Canth had already spent the vocative, and the only human translator of this work, holding a target language that has the honorific, wrote the singular «Stig upp!» at exactly this site. The loss at ¶175 is a chosen loss in a capable target, and it is now this translation's choice as well as Hertzberg's. D57's own text is left as written — it is a frozen log, and an erratum corrects the record without rewriting it. Standing consequence: V18 retired. register.md records that the honorific plural to a parent is lost in this book at every site, that the loss is chosen rather than forced, and that the two English carriers which would have worked are closed by V3 and V12 — rules taken in earlier spans about other problems.

Erratum 1 (2026-08-02, span 2) — V10 is superseded by V10a. Was: "A greeting answered with Jumal' antakoon is rendered as a bare greeting; the formula is not translated as a sentence." (from D11, span 1) Now (V10a): "«Jumal' antakoon» is rendered as "God grant it", keeping the formula, because the asymmetry between a secular greeting from above and a pious answer from below is class marking and is the only thing the exchange contains." Reason: D11 was taken in span 1 about a site in span 2, on the stated ground that the formula "recurs". It does not recur — ¶79 is its only occurrence in the novella. The rule was written before its single instance was read in place. Nothing already frozen in span 1 changes: D11's site was ¶79, so this erratum corrects a decision, not a rendered sentence. Standing consequence: no register rule is to be written for a site outside the span being translated. A rule taken at a distance was wrong the one time it was tested. Post-freeze note (not a change): the only independent witness, Hertzberg 1886, took D11's side — "-- God morgon! sade Heikura. / -- God morgon! svarade Mari." The evidence does not settle the rendering, and RS-20260802d §3.4 says so. What it does settle is the procedural point, which does not depend on which rendering is right: D11's stated ground — that the formula "recurs" — was false about the text.

Erratum 2 (2026-08-02, span 2) — V14 is superseded by V14a. Was: "The honorific plural from children to a parent is rendered as plain 'you'. English has nothing. Declared loss, with no compensation attempted — any would be fabrication." (from D28) Now (V14a): "The pronominal honorific is not carriable into English and is lost. A kinship address term is an available compensation and is not a fabrication: the authorized 1886 Swedish drops the pronominal honorific — which Swedish has — and marks the relation with the kin term instead («Blir mamma länge borta?»). Whether to take it is decided in the span where the site falls, per V17." Reason: D28's "any compensation would be fabrication" was an assertion, and it is false. It was tested twice this session and failed once. E-20260802d put the passage cold to three independent translators in two framings and 6 of 6 cells marked nothing — which supports D28. But Hertzberg, the only human translator of this work on record, did mark it, by a device English also has. A claim that no compensation exists is refuted by one that does. Not retro-fitted: span 2's «Viivyttekö kauan?» stays "Will you be long?" as frozen. The next occurrence is ¶176, in span 3, and V17 forbids deciding it from here.

D27, restated (2026-08-02) — a correction to this log, from E-20260802d §4.2. D27 wrote that third-person deferential address has no English equivalent "at any period". That is too strong and the probe refuted it: seat P3, given the Finnish cold, produced "I would most certainly deliver it to the lady" — the construction, in English, addressed to the lady. English has the string; what it lacks is the convention by which the string is heard as address, so kept, it re-reads as a third party — which is exactly the failure D27's own rejected-alternatives list predicted and then mis-described as unavailability. The rendering is unchanged and the loss is unchanged; the reason on record was wrong and now is not.