ter than purchase; you are
fond of rare books, and this is both curious and rare; I will sell it
cheap. Thank you, and now be gone; I will do all I can to procure the
Bible."

And in this manner I procured the Danish Bible, and I commenced my task;
first of all, however, I locked up in a closet the volume which had
excited my curiosity, saying, "Out of this closet thou comest not till I
deem myself competent to read thee," and then I sat down in right
earnest, comparing every line in the one version with the corresponding
one in the other; and I passed entire nights in this manner, till I was
almost blind, and the task was tedious enough at first, but I quailed
not, and soon began to make progress: and at first I had a misgiving that
the old book might not prove a Danish book, but was soon reassured by
reading many words in the Bible which I remembered to have seen in the
book; and then I went on right merrily, and I found that the language
which I was studying was by no means a difficult one, and in less than a
month I deemed myself able to read the book.

Anon, I took the book from the closet, and proceeded to make myself
master of its contents; I had some difficulty, for the language of the
book, though in the main the same as the language of the Bible, differed
from it in some points, being apparently a more ancient dialect; by
degrees, however, I overcame this difficulty, and I understood the
contents of the book, and well did they correspond with all those ideas
in which I had indulged connected with the Danes. For the book was a
book of ballads, about the deeds of knights and champions, and men of
huge stature; ballads which from time immemorial had been sung in the
North, and which some two centuries before the time of which I am
speaking had been collected by one Anders Vedel, who lived with a certain
Tycho Brahe, and assisted him in making observations upon the heavenly
bodies, at a place called Uranias Castle, on the little island of Hveen,
in the Cattegat.

CHAPTER XXIII

The Two Individuals--The Long Pipe--The Germans--Werther--The Female
Quaker--Suicide--Gibbon--Jesus of Bethlehem--Fill Your
Glass--Shakespeare--English at Minden--Melancholy Swayne Vonved--The
Fifth Dinner--Strange Doctrines--Are You Happy?--Improve Yourself in
German.

It might be some six months after the events last recorded, that two
individuals were seated together in a certain room, in a certain street
of the old town