I became an ardent, but never a
specially good, dancer.
XIX.
The world was widening out. Father brought from Paris a marvellous game,
called Fortuna, with bells over pockets in the wood, and balls which
were pushed with cues. Father had travelled from Paris with it five days
and six nights. It was inexpressibly fascinating; no one else in
Copenhagen had a game like it. And next year, when Father came home from
Paris again, he brought a large, flat, polished box, in which there were
a dozen different games, French games with balls, and battledores and
shuttlecocks, games which grown-up people liked playing, too; and there
were carriages which went round and round by clockwork, and a tumbler
who turned somersaults backwards down a flight of steps as soon as he
was placed on the top step. Those were things that the people in France
could do.
The world was widening out more and more. Relations often came over from
Goeteborg. They spoke Swedish, but if you paid great attention you could
understand quite well what they said. They spoke the language of
_Frithiof's Saga_, but pronounced it differently from Mr. Voltelen.
And there came a young French count whose relations my father's brother
had known; he had come as a sailor on a French man-o'-war, and he came
and stayed to dinner and sang the Marseillaise.
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