It had been a delightful garden—­alas, yes!  We great, grown-up men—­we play just so:  we make ourselves a garden with what we call love’s roses and friendship’s geraniums; we water them with our tears and with our heart’s blood; and yet they are, and remain, dry sticks without root.  It was a gloomy thought; I felt it, and in order to get the dry sticks in my thoughts to blossom, I went out.  I wandered in the fibres and in the long threads—­that is to say, in the small lanes—­and in the great street; and here was more life than I dared to expect.  I met a herd of cattle returning or going—­which I know not—­for they were without a herdsman.  The shop-boy still stood behind the counter, leaned over it and greeted me; the stranger took his hat off again—­that was my day’s employment in Sala.

Pardon me, thou silent town, which Gustavus Adolphus built, where his young heart felt the first emotions of love, and where the silver lies in the deep shafts—­that is to say, outside the town, “in a flat, and not very pleasant district.”

I knew no one in the town; I had no one to be my guide, so I accompanied the cows, and came to the churchyard.  The cows went past, but I stepped over the stile, and stood amongst the graves, where the grass grew high, and almost all the tombstones lay with worn-out inscriptions.  On a few only the date of the year was legible.  “Anno”—­yes, what then?  And who rested here?  Everything on the stone was erased—­blotted out like the earthly life of those mortals that here were earth in earth.  What life’s dream have ye dead played here in silent Sala?

The setting sun shone over the graves; not a leaf moved on the trees; all was still—­still as death—­in the city of the silver-mines, of which this traveller’s reminiscence is but a frame around the shop-boy who leaned over the counter.

THE MUTE BOOK.

* * * * *

By the high road into the forest there stood a solitary farm-house.  Our way lay right through the farm-yard; the sun shone; all the windows were open; there was life and bustle within, but in the yard, in an arbour of flowering lilacs, there stood an open coffin.  The corpse had been placed out here, and it was to be buried that forenoon.  No one stood by and wept over that dead man; no one hung sorrowfully over him; his face was covered with a white cloth, and under his head there lay a large, thick book, every leaf of which was a whole sheet of grey paper, and between each lay withered flowers, deposited and forgotten—­a whole herbarium, gathered in different places.  He himself had requested that it should be laid in the grave with him.  A chapter of his life was blended with every flower.

“Who is that dead man?” we asked, and the answer was:  “The old student from Upsala.  They say he was once very clever; he knew the learned languages, could sing and write verses too; but then there was something that went wrong, and so he gave both his thoughts and himself up to drinking spirits, and as his health suffered by it, he came out here into the country, where they paid for his board and lodging.