Street. I stuck my elbows closely to my sides, tried to make myself
look small, and slipped unperceived past some acquaintances who had
taken up their stand at the corner of University Street to gaze at the
passers-by. I wandered up Castle Hill and fell into a reverie.

How gaily and lightly these people I met carried their radiant heads,
and swung themselves through life as through a ball-room! There was no
sorrow in a single look I met, no burden on any shoulder, perhaps not
even a clouded thought, not a little hidden pain in any of the happy
souls. And I, walking in the very midst of these people, young and
newly-fledged as I was, had already forgotten the very look of
happiness. I hugged these thoughts to myself as I went on, and found
that a great injustice had been done me. Why had the last months
pressed so strangely hard on me? I failed to recognize my own happy
temperament, and I met with the most singular annoyances from all
quarters. I could not sit down on a bench by myself or set my foot any
place without being assailed by insignificant accidents, miserable
details, that forced their way into my imagination and scattered my
powers to all the four winds. A dog that dashed by me, a yellow rose in
a man's buttonhole, had the power to set my thoughts vibrating and
occupy me for a length of time.

* * * * *

What was it that ailed me? Was the hand of the Lord turned against me?
But why just against me? Why, for that matter, not just as well against
a man in South America? When I considered the matter over, it grew more
and more incomprehensible to me that I of all others should be selected
as an experiment for a Creator's whims. It was, to say the least of it,
a peculiar mode of procedure to pass over a whole world of other humans
in order to reach me. Why not select just as well Bookseller Pascha, or
Hennechen the steam agent?

As I went my way I sifted this thing, and could not get quit of it. I
found the most weighty arguments against the Creator's arbitrariness in
letting me pay for all the others' sins. Even after I had found a seat
and sat down, the query persisted in occupying me, and prevented me
from thinking of aught else. From the day in May when my ill-luck began
I could so clearly notice my gradually increasing debility; I had
become, as it were, too languid to control or lead myself whither I
would go. A swarm of tiny noxious animals had bored a way into my inner