him! still farther away, broad and heavy, hung his father, by the few thin hairs on his neck, with wretched distorted face as on his death-bed.  In other respects those two were not great sinners.  They were old; but his sins were great, for he was young, and therefore nothing had ever prospered with him, not even in his childhood.  There had always been something which had caused him to be misunderstood or which had frightened him or made him constantly constrained and uncertain of himself.  Never had he been able to keep to the main point, and thus to be in quiet natural peace.  With only one exception—­his meeting with Helene.

It seemed to him that he was sitting in the boat with her out in the bay.  The sky was bright, there was melody in the woods.  Now he was up on the hill with her, among the saplings, and she was explaining to him that it depended on her care whether they throve or not.

He went to the brook to drink; he lay down over the water.  He was thus able to see his own face.  How could that happen?  Why, there was sunshine overhead.  He was able to see his own face.  Great heavens! how like his father he had become.  In the last year he had grown very like his father—­people had said so.  He well remembered his mother’s manner when she noticed it.  But, good God! were those grey hairs?  Yes, in quantities, so that his hair was no longer red but grey.  No one had told him of it.  Had he advanced so far, been so little prepared for it, that Hans Ravn’s remark, “How you are altered, Rafael!” had frightened him?

He had certainly given up observing himself, in this coarse life of quarrels.  In it, certainly, neither words nor deeds were weighed, and hence this hunted feeling.  It was only natural that he had ceased to observe.  If the brook had been a little deeper, he would have let himself be engulfed in it.  He got up, and went on again, quicker and quicker:  sometimes he saw one person, sometimes another, hanging in the woods.

He dare not turn round.  Was it so very wonderful that others besides himself and his family had turned from the beaten track, and peopled the byways and the boughs in the wood?  He had been unjust towards himself and his parents; they were not alone, they were in only too large a company.  What will unjust people say, but that the very thing which requires strength does not receive it, but half of it comes to nothing, more than half of the powers are wasted.  Here, in these strips of woodland which run up the hills side by side, like organ-pipes, Henrik Vergeland had also roamed:  within an ace, with him too, within an ace!  Wonderful how the ravens gather together here, where so many people are hanging.  Ha! ha!  He must write this to his mother!  It was something to write about to her, who had left him, who deserted him when he was the most unhappy, because all that she cared for was to keep her sacred person inviolate, to maintain her obstinate opinion, to gratify her pique—­Oh! what long hair!—­How