g had seized upon him, and made it impossible to him.

"There you were playing the martyr!" said Wilhelm, laughing. "Could you
not immediately tell me how you were constituted? So are most men. When
they have no trouble, they generally hatch one themselves; they will
rather stand in the cold shadow than in the warm sunshine, and yet the
choice stands open to us. Dear friend, reflect; now we are both of us on
the stream: we shall soon be put into the great business-bottles, where
we shall, like little devils, stretch and strain ourselves without
ever getting out, until life withdraws from us!" He laid his arm
confidentially upon Otto's shoulder. "Often have I wished to speak with
you upon one point! Yes, I do not desire that you should confess every
word, every thought to me. I already know that I shall be able to prove
to you that the thing lies in a region where it cannot have the power
which you ascribe to it. In the cold zones a venomous bite does not
operate as dangerously as in warmer ones; a sorrow in childhood cannot
overpower us as it does in riper age. Whatever misfortune may have
happened to you when a child, if in your wildness--you yourself say that
you were wild--whatsoever you may have then done, it cannot, it ought
not to influence your whole life: your understanding could tell you this
better than I. At our age we find ourselves in the land of joy, or we
never enter it!"

"You are a happy man!" exclaimed Otto, and gazed sorrowfully before
him. "Your childhood afforded you only joy and hope! Only think of the
solitude in which mine was passed. Among the sand-hills of the west
coast my days glided away: my grandfather was gloomy and passionate;
our old preacher lived only in a past time which I knew not, and Rosalie
regarded the world through the spectacles of sorrow. Such an environment
might well cast a shadow upon my life-joy. Even in dress, one is
strangely remarkable when one comes from afar province to the capital;
first this receives another cut, and one gradually becomes like those
around one. The same thing happens in a spiritual relation, but one's
being and ideas one does not change so quickly as one's clothes. I have
only been a short time among strangers, and who knows?" added he, with
a melancholy smile, "perhaps I shall come into equilibrium when some
really great misfortune happens to me and very much overpowers me,
and then I may show the same carelessness, the same phlegm as the
multitud