tremblingly expected the change--and were only buried.

How many had there been before them with the same experience?

CHAPTER VII.

I left Skogstad at once, and without taking leave of the parents, who
were with their children. I got a horse to the next station, and was
soon slowly driving along the chaussee. The snow which had fallen made
the road heavier than when I had come that way. A few atoms still swept
about through the air but the fall was lightening more and more, so that
the moonlight gradually gained in force. It fell on the snow-clad
forest, which still stood unchanged, with fantastic power; for although
the details were lost the contrasts were striking.

I was weary, and the mood I was in harmonized with my fatigue. In the
still subdued moonlight the forest looked like a bowed-down, conquered
people; its burden was greater than it could bear. Nevertheless, it
stood there patiently, tree after tree, without end, bowed to the
ground. It was like a people from the far-distant past to the present
day, a people buried in dust. Yonder "heaven-fallen, merciful snow"--

And just as all symbols, even those from the times of old, which
mythology dimly reveals to us, became fixed in the imagination, and
gradually worked their way out to independence, so it was now with mine.
I saw the past generations enveloped in a cloud of dust, in which they
could not recognize one another, and that was why they fought against
one another, slaying one another by the millions. Dust was being
continually strewed over them. But I saw that it was the same with all
those who were wounded, or who must die. I saw in the midst of these
poor sufferers many kind, refined souls, who in thus strewing dust were
rendering the highest, most beautiful service they knew, like those
priestly physicians of Egypt, who offered to the sick and dying magic
formulas as the most effectual preventive of death, and placed on the
wounds a medicine, the greater part of which was composed of mystic
symbols.

And I saw _all_ the relations of life, even the soundest, strewed over
with a coating of dust, and the attempt at deliverance to be the world's
most complete revolution, which would wholly shatter these relations
themselves.

And as I grew more and more weary and these fancies left me, but what I
had recently experienced kept rising uppermost in my mind, then I
plainly heard weeping in among the snow-flakes that were no longer
falling; it