“I tell you I was there, and you can conceive that I saw everything there was to be seen.  Had you come over there, you would not have been a man; but I became so!  And besides, I learned to know my inward nature, my innate qualities, the relationship I had with Poesy.  At the time I was with you, I thought not of that, but always—­you know it well—­when the sun rose, and when the sun went down, I became so strangely great; in the moonlight I was very near being more distinct than yourself; at that time I did not understand my nature; it was revealed to me in the antechamber!  I became a man!  I came out matured; but you were no longer in the warm lands; as a man I was ashamed to go as I did.  I was in want of boots, of clothes, of the whole human varnish that makes a man perceptible.  I took my way—­I tell it to you, but you will not put it in any book—­I took my way to the cake woman—­I hid myself behind her; the woman didn’t think how much she concealed.  I went out first in the evening; I ran about the streets in the moonlight; I made myself long up the walls—­it tickles the back so delightfully!  I ran up, and ran down, peeped into the highest windows, into the saloons, and on the roofs, I peeped in where no one could peep, and I saw what no one else saw, what no one else should see!  This is, in fact, a base world!  I would not be a man if it were not now once accepted and regarded as something to be so!  I saw the most unimaginable things with the women, with the men, with parents, and with the sweet, matchless children; I saw,” said the shadow, “what no human being must know, but what they would all so willingly know—­what is bad in their neighbor.  Had I written a newspaper, it would have been read!  But I wrote direct to the persons themselves, and there was consternation in all the towns where I came.  They were so afraid of me, and yet they were so excessively fond of me.  The professors made a professor of me; the tailors gave me new clothes—­I am well furnished; the master of the mint struck new coin for me, and the women said I was so handsome!  And so I became the man I am.  And I now bid you farewell.  Here is my card—­I live on the sunny side of the street, and am always at home in rainy weather!” And so away went the shadow.  “That was most extraordinary!” said the learned man.  Years and days passed away, then the shadow came again.  “How goes it?” said the shadow.

“Alas!” said the learned man.  “I write about the true, and the good, and the beautiful, but no one cares to hear such things; I am quite desperate, for I take it so much to heart!”

“But I don’t!” said the shadow.  “I become fat, and it is that one wants to become!  You do not understand the world.  You will become ill by it.  You must travel!  I shall make a tour this summer; will you go with me?  I should like to have a travelling companion!  Will you go with me, as shadow?  It will be a great pleasure for me to have you with me; I shall pay the travelling expenses!”