and
expanded wonderfully.

"It is flying over the sea!" exclaimed the children who saw the white
bird. Now it seemed to dip into the ocean, now it arose into the clear
sunshine; it glittered in the air; it disappeared high, high above;
and the children said that it had flown up to the sun.

_Ole, the Watchman of the Tower._

"In the world it is always going up and down, and down and up again;
but I can't go higher than I am," said Ole, the watchman of the church
tower. "Ups and downs most people have to experience; in point of
fact, we each become at last a kind of tower-watchman--we look at life
and things from above."

Thus spoke Ole up in the lofty tower--my friend the watchman, a
cheerful, chatty old fellow, who seemed to blurt everything out at
random, though there were, in reality, deep and earnest feelings
concealed in his heart. He had come of a good stock; some people even
said that he was the son of a _Conferentsraad_,[5] or might have been
that. He had studied, had been a teacher's assistant, assistant clerk
in the church; but these situations had not done much for him. At one
time he lived at the chief clerk's, and was to have bed and board
free. He was then young, and somewhat particular about his dress, as I
have heard. He insisted on having his boots polished and brushed with
blacking, but the head clerk would only allow grease; and this was a
cause of dissension between them. The one talked of stinginess, the
other talked of foolish vanity. The blacking became the dark
foundation of enmity, and so they parted; but what he had demanded
from the clerk he also demanded from the world--real blacking; and he
always got its substitute, grease; so he turned his back upon all
mankind, and became a hermit. But a hermitage coupled with a
livelihood is not to be had in the midst of a large city except up in
the steeple of a church. Thither he betook himself, and smoked his
pipe in solitude. He looked up, and he looked down; reflected
according to his fashion upon all he saw, and all he did not see--on
what he read in books, and what he read in himself.

[Footnote 5: A Danish title.]

I often lent him books, good books; and people can converse about
these, as everybody knows. He did not care for fashionable English
novels, he said, nor for French ones either--they were all too
frivolous. No, he liked biographies, and books that relate to the
wonders of nature. I visited him at least once a year, gene