le finished, though."

"Do you think that? Maybe the spirit will move me tomorrow, or perhaps
already, tonight; it isn't at all impossible but that it may move me
some time tonight, and then my article will be completed in a quarter
of an hour at the outside. You see, it isn't with my work as with other
people's; I can't sit down and get a certain amount finished in a day.
I have just to wait for the right moment, and no one can tell the day
or hour when the spirit may move one--it must have its own time...."

My landlady went, but her confidence in me was evidently much shaken.

As soon as I was left alone I jumped up and tore my hair in despair.
No, in spite of all, there was really no salvation for me--no
salvation! My brain was bankrupt! Had I then really turned into a
complete dolt since I could not even add up the price of a piece of
Dutch cheese? But could it be possible I had lost my senses when I
could stand and put such questions to myself? Had not I, into the
bargain, right in the midst of my efforts with the reckoning, made the
lucid observation that my landlady was in the family way? I had no
reason for knowing it, no one had told me anything about it, neither
had it occurred to me gratuitously. I sat and saw it with my own eyes,
and I understood it at once, right at a despairing moment where I sat
and added up sixteenths. How could I explain this to myself?

I went to the window and gazed out; it looked out into Vognmandsgade.
Some children were playing down on the pavement; poorly dressed
children in the middle of a poor street. They tossed an empty bottle
between them and screamed shrilly. A load of furniture rolled slowly
by; it must belong to some dislodged family, forced to change residence
between "flitting time." [Footnote: In Norway, l4th of March and
October.] This struck me at once. Bed-clothes and furniture were heaped
on the float, moth-eaten beds and chests of drawers, red-painted chairs
with three legs, mats, old iron, and tin-ware. A little girl--a mere
child, a downright ugly youngster, with a running cold in her nose--sat
up on top of the load, and held fast with her poor little blue hands in
order not to tumble off. She sat on a heap of frightfully stained
mattresses, that children must have lain on, and looked down at the
urchins who were tossing the empty bottle to one another....

I stood gazing at all this; I had no difficulty in apprehending
everything that passed before me. Whil