better
class of strangers who desire to increase their information. He studied
the King's Newmarket with the "horse" in the middle of it, looked
respectfully up the pillars of Our Lady's, stood long before
Thorwaldsen's noble and lovely sculpture, climbed the Round Tower,
visited castles, and spent two lively evenings in the Tivoli. But all
this was not really what he saw.

On the houses, which frequently had the very look of the old houses of
his native city with their curved and pierced gables, he would see
names that were familiar to him from olden times, which seemed to him
to signify something tender and precious, and at the same time included
something like reproach, lament, and longing for things lost. And
everywhere, while breathing in retarded, meditative draughts the moist
sea-air, he saw eyes as blue, hair as blond, faces of just the same
type and formation as those he had seen in the strangely grievous and
regretful dreams of the night spent in his native city. It not seldom
happened on the open street that a glance, a ringing word, a peal of
laughter would strike his very marrow ...

He could not long endure the gay city. An unrest, sweet and foolish,
half recollection and half expectation, stirred him, together with the
desire to lie quietly somewhere along the shore and not have to play
the eagerly observing tourist. So he took ship again and sailed on a
gloomy day (the sea was black) northward up the coast of Seeland to
Elsinore. From there he continued his journey without delay by carriage
along the high road for three quarters of an hour, always a little
above the sea, until he stopped at his final and real goal, the little
white summer hotel with green blinds which stood in the midst of a
settlement of low cottages, and whose wooden-roofed tower looked out on
the strand and toward the Swedish coast. Here he got out, took
possession of the sunny room that had been kept ready for him, filled
book-shelf and wardrobe with the effects he had brought with him, and
prepared to live here a while.

VIII

September was already at hand; there were no longer many guests in
Aalsgaard. At the meals in the great timber-ceiled dining-hall on the
ground floor, whose high windows opened out upon the sun-porch and the
sea, the hostess always presided, an elderly spinster with white hair,
colorless eyes, delicately pink cheeks, and a quavering, chirping
voice, who always tried to gro