ting and terrible.

After the soldiers had disappeared beyond the bend toward the woods,
people came hurrying to the spot of the shooting, though till then not
a soul had been in sight.

The bodies lay at the roadside on the other side of the railing, where
the snow was clean, brittle and untrampled and glistened cheerfully in
the bright atmosphere. There were three dead bodies, two men and a
boy. The boy lay with his long soft neck stretched on the snow. The
face of the man next to the boy was invisible. He had fallen face
downward in a pool of blood. The third was a big man with a black
beard and huge, muscular arms. He lay stretched out to the full length
of his big body, his arms extended over a large area of blood-stained
snow.

The three men who had been shot lay black against the white snow,
motionless. From afar no one could have told the terror that was in
their immobility as they lay there at the edge of the narrow road
crowded with people.

That night Gabriel Andersen in his little room in the schoolhouse did
not write poems as usual. He stood at the window and looked at the
distant pale disk of the moon in the misty blue sky, and thought. And
his thoughts were confused, gloomy, and heavy as if a cloud had
descended upon his brain.

Indistinctly outlined in the dull moonlight he saw the dark railing,
the trees, the empty garden. It seemed to him that he beheld them--the
three men who had been shot, two grown up, one a child. They were
lying there now at the roadside, in the empty, silent field, looking
at the far-off cold moon with their dead, white eyes as he with his
living eyes.

"The time will come some day," he thought, "when the killing of people
by others will be an utter impossibility The time will come when even
the soldiers and officers who killed these three men will realise what
they have done and will understand that what they killed them for is
just as necessary, important, and dear to them--to the officers and
soldiers--as to those whom they killed.

"Yes," he said aloud and solemnly, his eyes moistening, "that time
will come. They will understand." And the pale disk of the moon was
blotted out by the moisture in his eyes.

A large pity pierced his heart for the three victims whose eyes looked
at the moon, sad and unseeing. A feeling of rage cut him as with a
sharp knife and took possession of him.

But Gabriel Andersen quieted his heart, whispering softly, "They know
not what they