draughtsman
to begin with, and I enclose funds for the passage out. So come along."

But Peer did not go at once. He stayed on another year at the College,
as assistant to the lecturer on mechanics, while himself going through
the road and railway construction course, as his half-brother had done.
Some secret instinct urged him not to be left behind even in this.

As the year went on the letters from his two comrades became more and
more pressing and tempting. "Out here," wrote Klaus, "the engineer is
a missionary, proclaimer, not Jehovah, but the power and culture of
Europe. You're bound to take a hand in that, my boy. There's work worthy
of a great general waiting for you here."

At last, one autumn day, when the woods stood yellow all around the
town, Peer drove away from his home with a big new travelling-trunk
strapped to the driver's seat. He had been up to the churchyard before
starting, with a little bunch of flowers for Louise's grave. Who could
say if he would ever see it again?

At the station he stood for a moment looking back over the old city with
its cathedral, and the ancient fortress, where the sentry was pacing
back and forth against the skyline. Was this the end of his youth?
Louise--the room above the stables--the hospital, the lazarette, the
College. . . . And there lay the fjord, and far out somewhere on the
coast there stood no doubt a little grey fisher-hut, where a pock-marked
goodwife and her bow-legged goodman had perhaps even now received the
parcel of coffee and tobacco sent them as a parting gift.

And so Peer journeyed to the capital, and from there out into the wide
world.

BOOK II

Chapter I

Some years had passed--a good many years--and once more summer had come,
and June. A passenger steamer, bound from Antwerp to Christiania, was
ploughing her way one evening over a sea so motionlessly calm that it
seemed a single vast mirror filled with a sky of grey and pink-tinged
clouds. There were plenty of passengers on board, and no one felt
inclined for bed; it was so warm, so beautiful on deck. Some artists, on
their way home from Paris or Munich, cast about for amusements to pass
the time; some ordered wine, others had unearthed a concertina, and very
soon, no one knew how, a dance was in full swing. "No, my dear," said
one or two cautious mothers to their girls, "certainly not." But before
long the mothers were dancing themselves. Then there was a doctor in
spectacles