vening to play cards--till the children are in bed--then I could play
with you. That would be better."

"Thank you very much. But what about the rest of the day? Do you know
what it's like to go about from dawn to dark feeling that every minute
is wasted, and wasted for nothing? No, you can't know it. What am I
to do with myself all through one of these endless, deadly days? Drink
myself drunk?"

"Couldn't you try cutting firewood for a little?"

"Firewood?" He whistled softly. "Well, that's an idea. Ye--yes. Let's
try chopping firewood for a change."

Thud, thud, thud!

But as he straightened his back for a breathing-space, the whirr, whirr
of Raastad's mowing machine came to him from the hill-slope near by
where it was working, and he clenched his teeth as if they ached. He
was driving a mowing machine of his own invention, and it was raining
continually, and the grass kept sticking, sticking--and how to put it
right--put it right? It was as if blows were falling on festering wounds
in his head, making him dance with pain. Thud, thud, thud!--anything to
drown the whirr of that machine.

But a man may use an axe with his hands, and yet have idiotic fancies
all the time bubbling and seething in his head. The power to hold in
check the vagaries of imagination may be gone. From all sides they come
creeping out in swarms, they swoop down on him like birds of prey--as if
in revenge for having been driven away so often before--they cry: here
we are! He stood once more as an apprentice in the mechanical works,
riveting the plates of a gigantic boiler with a compressed-air
tube--cling, clang! The wailing clang of the boiler went out over
the whole town. And now that same boiler is set up inside his
head--cling-clang--ugh! A cold sweat breaks out upon his body; he throws
down the axe; he must go--must fly, escape somewhere--where, he cannot
tell. Faces that he hates to think of peer out at him from every corner,
yapping out: "Heh!--what did we say? To-day a beggar--to-morrow a madman
in a cell."

But it may happen, too, that help comes in the night. Things come back
to a man that it is good to remember. That time--and that other. . . . A
woman there--and the one you met in such a place. There is a picture
in the Louvre, by Veronese: a young Venetian woman steps out upon the
marble stairway of a palace holding a golden-haired boy by the hand;
she is dressed in black velvet, she glows with youth and happiness. A
lovers'