like pictures in a thaumatrope. But when it is made to revolve, they melt together and form a picture, significant or insignificant as the case may be.
One day the child sees splendid pictures of emperors and kings in blue and red uniforms, which the servant-girls hang up in the nursery. He sees another representing a building which flies in the air and is full of Turks. Another time he hears someone read in a newspaper how, in a distant land, they are firing cannon at towns and villages, and remembers many details—for instance, his mother weeping at hearing of poor fishermen driven out of their burning cottages with their children. These pictures and descriptions referred to Czar Nicholas and Napoleon III., the storming of Sebastopol, and the bombardment of the coast of Finland. On another occasion his father spends the whole day at home. All the tumblers in the house are placed on the window-ledges. They are filled with sand in which candles are inserted and lit at night. All the rooms are warm and bright. It is bright too in the Clara school-house and in the church and the vicarage; the church is full of music. These are the illuminations to celebrate the recovery of King Oscar.
One day there is a great noise in the kitchen. The bell is rung and his mother called. There stands a man in uniform with a book in his hand and writes. The cook weeps, his mother supplicates and speaks loud, but the man with the helmet speaks still louder. It is the policeman! The cry goes all over the house, and all day long they talk of the police. His father is summoned to the police-station. Will he be arrested? No; but he has to pay three rix-dollars and sixteen skillings, because the cook had emptied a utensil in the gutter in the daytime.
One afternoon he sees them lighting the lamps in the street. A cousin draws his attention to the fact that they have no oil and no wicks, but only a metal burner. They are the first gas-lamps.
For many nights he lies in bed, without getting up by day. He is tired and sleepy. A harsh-voiced man comes to the bed, and says that he must not lay his hands outside the coverlet. They give him evil-tasting stuff with a spoon; he eats nothing. There is whispering in the room, and his mother weeps. Then he sits again at the window in the bedroom. Bells are tolling the whole day long. Green biers are carried over the churchyard. Sometimes a dark mass of people stand round a black chest. Gravediggers with their spades keep coming and going. He has to wear a copper plate suspended by a blue silk ribbon on his breast, and chew all day at a root. That is the cholera epidemic of 1854.
One day he goes a long way with one of the servants—so far that he becomes homesick and cries for his mother. The servant takes him into a house; they sit in a dark kitchen near a green water-butt. He thinks he will never see his home again. But they still go on, past ships and barges, past a gloomy brick house with long high walls behind which prisoners sit. He sees a new church, a new alley lined with trees, a dusty high-road along whose edges dandelions grow. Now the servant carries him. At last they come to a great stone building hard by which is a yellow wooden house with a cross, surrounded by a large garden. They see limping, mournful-looking people dressed in white. They reach a great hall where are nothing but beds painted brown, with old women in them. The walls are whitewashed, the old women are white, and the beds are white. There is a very bad smell. They pass by a row of beds, and in the middle of the room stop at a bed on the right side. In it lies a woman younger than the rest with black curly hair confined by a night-cap. She lies half on her back; her face is emaciated, and she wears a white cloth over her head and ears. Her thin hands are wrapped up in white bandages and her arms shake ceaselessly so that her knuckles knock against each other. When she sees the child, her arms and knees tremble violently, and she bursts into tears. She kisses his head, but the boy does not feel comfortable. He is shy, and not far from crying himself. "Don't you know Christina again?" she says; but he does not. Then she dries her eyes and describes her sufferings to the servant, who is taking eatables out of a basket.
The old women in white now begin to talk in an undertone, and Christina begs the servant not to show what she has in the basket, for they are so envious. Accordingly the servant pushes surreptitiously a yellow rix-dollar into the psalm-book on the table. The child finds the whole thing tedious. His heart says nothing to him; it does not tell him that he has drunk this woman's milk, which really belonged to another; it does not tell him that he had slept his best sleep on that shrunken bosom, that those shaking arms had cradled, carried, and dandled him; his heart says nothing, for the heart is only a muscle, which pumps blood indifferent as to the source it springs from. But after receiving her last fervent kisses, after bowing to the old women and the nurse, and breathing freely in the courtyard after inhaling the close air of the sick-ward, he becomes somehow conscious of a debt, which can only be paid by perpetual gratitude, a few eatables, and a rix-dollar slipped into a psalm-book, and he feels ashamed at being glad to get away from the brown-painted beds of the sufferers.
It was his wet-nurse, who subsequently lay for fifteen years in the same bed, suffering from fits of cramp and wasting disease, till she died. Then he received his portrait in a schoolboy's cap, sent back by the directors of the Sabbatsberg infirmary, where it had hung for many years. During that time the growing youth had only once a year given her an hour of indescribable joy, and himself one of some uneasiness of conscience, by going to see her. Although he had received from her inflammation in his blood, and cramp in his nerves, still he felt he owed her a debt, a representative debt. It was not a personal one, for she had only given him what she had been obliged to sell. The fact that she had been compelled to sell it was the sin of society, and as a member of society he felt himself in a certain degree guilty.
Sometimes the child went to the churchyard, where everything seemed strange. The vaults with the stone monuments bearing inscriptions and carved figures, the grass on which one might not step, the trees with leaves which one might not touch. One day his uncle plucked a leaf, but the police were instantly on the spot. The great building in the middle was unintelligible to him. People went in and out of it, and one heard singing and music, ringing and chiming. It was mysterious. At the east end was a window with a gilded eye. That was God's eye. He did not understand that, but at any rate it was a large eye which must see far.
Under the window was a grated cellar-opening. His uncle pointed out to him the polished coffins below. "Here," he said, "lives Clara the Nun." Who was she? He did not know, but supposed it must be a ghost.
One day he stands in an enormous room and does not know where he is; but it is beautiful, everything in white and gold. Music, as if from a hundred pianos, sounds over his head, but he cannot see the instrument or the person who plays it. There stand long rows of benches, and quite in front is a picture, probably of some Bible story. Two white-winged figures are kneeling, and near them are two large candlesticks. Those are probably the angels with the two lights who go about our house. The people on the benches are bowed down as though they were sleeping. "Take your caps off," says his uncle, and holds his hat before his face. The boys look round, and see close beside them a strange-looking seat on which are two men in grey mantles and hoods. They have iron chains on their hands and feet, and policemen stand by them.
"Those are thieves," whispers their uncle.
All this oppresses the boy with a sense of weirdness, strangeness, and severity. His brothers also feel it, for they ask their uncle to go, and he complies.
Strange! Such are the impressions made by that form of worship which was intended to symbolise the simple truths of Christianity. But it was not like the mild teaching of Christ. The sight of the thieves was the worst—in iron chains, and such coats!
One day, when the sun shines warmly, there is a great stir in the house. Articles of furniture are moved from their place, drawers are emptied, clothes are thrown about everywhere. A morning or two after, a waggon comes to take away the things, and so the journey begins. Some of the family start in a boat from "the red shop," others go in a cab. Near the harbour there is a smell of oil, tar, and coal smoke; the freshly painted steamboats shine in gay colours and their flags flutter in the breeze; drays rattle past the long row of lime-trees; the yellow riding-school stands dusty and dirty near a woodshed. They are going on the water,
