But what worked still more strongly upon my youthful imagination was his manner.  There was something unusually noble about his slender figure and his delicate, oval-shaped, earnest face, with the high forehead and the heavy masses of dark, curly hair on the temples.  His strongly-marked eyebrows and a decided Roman nose drew one’s attention away from his eyes, which were light blue, and more in keeping with his pale and beardless face than with his more energetic features.  But yet it was his eyes that gave one the first impression of him.  I learned later to read his features differently, and to see that in them was reflected the meeting of the currents of that twofold nature by which his life was gradually crushed out.

A sweet smile when he talked and a reserved manner gave him a distinguished air, which at any rate impressed me greatly.  He was the only student I knew who did not wear a student’s cap; he used to wear a flat blue sailor’s cap with a short peak, which suited him very well.  When he became eager, as might happen in a dispute—­for he was a great logician, though it was only his intellect that took part in a discussion, and never, as far as I could see, his heart or his deeper feelings—­his voice would give way; it became overstrained and harsh, as if from a weak chest.  Such encounters always told upon him, and left him in irritable restlessness for some time after.

One of his peculiarities was that he sometimes went on walking tours of several days out in the country, both in summer and winter.  Companionship he would never hear of.  Had he wished for it, he would have asked me I knew, and therefore I never thought of forcing myself upon him.

On these occasions he would set off without a knapsack; I noticed this once when I happened to be roaming in the fields two or three miles [A Norwegian mile is about seven English miles.] from a town, where I had gone on a visit.  When he came home again, he would be in capital spirits, but before setting out he was always so silent and melancholy that I had to sustain nearly the whole burden of the conversation.  He used to have periods of low spirits.

One indication of these moods was his manner in playing on the violin I had now found with broken strings, at the back of his bookshelf.  As it lay there, it recalled the incidents of twenty years ago.

This violin he once held in high esteem; it had the place of honour on his wall, with the bow beside it.  It had been left him by a friend, an old clerk, [Norw. “klokker,” almost answering to the Scotch precentor, but a klokker, in addition to leading the singing in church, has to read the opening prayer and to assist the priest in putting on his vestments.] at his home up in the north, who had taught him to play, and had evidently been one of those musical geniuses who are never fully appreciated in this world.

David loved to give play to his fancy, not only upon this violin—­he had a good ear, and had learnt not a little—­but also about it:  where it really came from, and how old it might be?  He would exceedingly have liked an indistinct mark inside to mean that it was “possibly a Cremona”; it was one of his weak points, and this room for conjecture was evidently, in his eyes, one of the excellences of the violin.