leader. The apprentice was
still standing behind the counter; he bowed over it and greeted;
the stranger took off his hat in return; these were the events of
this day in Sala. Pardon me, thou still town, which Gustavus
Adolphus built, where his young heart glowed in its first love, and
where the silver rests in the deep shafts without the town, in a
flat and not very pleasant country. I knew no one in this town, no
one conducted me about, and so I went with the cows, and reached
the graveyard; the cows went on, I climbed over the fence, and
found myself between the graves, where the green grass grew, and
nearly all the tombstones lay with inscriptions blotted out; only
here and there, 'Anno' was still legible--what further? And who
rests here? Everything on the stone was effaced, as the earth life
of the one who was now earth within the earth. What drama have ye
dead ones played here in the still Sala? The setting sun threw its
beams over the graves, no leaf stirred on the tree; all was still,
deathly still, in the town of the silver mines, which for the
remembrance of the traveller is only a frame about the apprentice,
who bowed greeting over the counter.'

Silence, stillness, quiet, solitude, loneliness, far-away-ness; hushed,
calm, remote, out of the world, un-newspapered, operaless,
un-gossipped--was there ever a sketch which carried one so far from the
world as this of 'Sala'? That _one_ shopboy--those going or coming
cows--the tombs, with wornout dates, every point of time vanishing--a
living grave!

Contrast again, dear reader. Verily she is a goddess--and I adore her.
Lo! she brings me back again in Sala to the busy streets of this city,
and the office, and the 'exchanges,' and the rustling, bustling world,
and the hotel dinner--to be in time for which I am even now writing
against time--and I am thankful for it all. Sala has cured me. That
picture drives away longings. Verily, he who lives in America, and in
its great roaring current of events, needs but a glance at Sala to feel
that _here_ he is on a darting stream ever hurrying more gloriously into
the world and away from the dull inanity--which the merest sibilant of
aggravation will change to insanity.

Reader, our Andersen is an artist--as most children know. But I am glad
that he seldom gives us anything which is so _very_ much of a monochrome
as Sala.

I wonder