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 which I have so frequently had occasion to mention in the
preceding pages; one of them was an elderly, and the other a very young
man, and they sat on either side of a fireplace, beside a table on which
were fruit and wine; the room was a small one, and in its furniture
exhibited nothing remarkable. Over the mantelpiece, however, hung a
small picture with naked figures in the foreground, and with much foliage
behind. It might not have struck every beholder, for it looked old and
smoke-dried; but a connoisseur, on inspecting it closely, would have
pronounced it to be a judgment of Paris, and a masterpiece of the Flemish
school.

The forehead of the elder individual w