he intention of
entering the Military Academy. He was a tall, handsome youth, slender
of stature, and carried himself as erect as a candle. He had a light,
clear complexion of almost feminine delicacy; blond, curly hair, which
he always kept carefully brushed; a low forehead, and a straight,
finely modeled nose. There was an expression of extreme sensitiveness
about the nostrils, and a look of indolence in the dark-blue eyes. But
the _ensemble_ of his features was pleasing, his dress irreproachable,
and his manners bore no trace of the awkward self-consciousness
peculiar to his age. Immediately on his arrival in the capital he hired
a suite of rooms in the aristocratic part of the city, and furnished
them rather expensively, but in excellent taste. From a bosom friend,
whom he met by accident in the restaurant's pavilion in the park, he
learned that a pair of antlers, a stuffed eagle, or falcon, and a
couple of swords, were indispensable to a well-appointed apartment. He
accordingly bought these articles at a curiosity shop. During the first
weeks of his residence in the city he made some feeble efforts to
perfect himself in mathematics, in which he suspected he was somewhat
deficient. But when the same officious friend laughed at him, and
called him "green," he determined to trust to fortune, and henceforth
devoted himself the more assiduously to the French ballet, where he had
already made some interesting acquaintances.

The time for the examination came; the French ballet did not prove a
good preparation; Ralph failed. It quite shook him for the time, and he
felt humiliated. He had not the courage to tell his father; so he
lingered on from day to day, sat vacantly gazing out of his window, and
tried vainly to interest himself in the busy bustle down on the street.
It provoked him that everybody else should be so light-hearted, when he
was, or at least fancied himself, in trouble. The parlor grew
intolerable; he sought refuge in his bedroom. There he sat one evening
(it was the third day after the examination), and stared out upon the
gray stone walls which on all sides inclosed the narrow courtyard. The
round stupid face of the moon stood tranquilly dozing like a great
Limburger cheese suspended under the sky.

Ralph, at least, could think of a no more fitting simile. But the
bright-eyed young girl in the window hard by sent a longing look up to
the same moon, and thought of her distant home on the fjords, where th