There was too much
consideration shown towards those who would not work or could not
understand. And from the time I was sixteen, school was my despair. I
had done with it all, was beyond it all, was too matured to submit to
the routine of lessons; my intellectual pulses no longer beat within the
limits of school. What absorbed my interest was the endeavour to become
master of the Danish language in prose and verse, and musings over the
mystery of existence. In school I most often threw up the sponge
entirely, and laid my head on my arms that I might neither see nor hear
what was going on around me.
There was another reason, besides my weariness of it all, which at this
latter period made my school-going a torture to me. I was by now
sufficiently schooled for my sensible mother to think it would be good
for me to make, if it were but a small beginning, towards earning my own
living. Or rather, she wanted me to earn enough to pay for my amusements
myself. So I tried, with success, to find pupils, and gave them lessons
chiefly on Sunday mornings; but in order to secure them I had called
myself _Studiosus_. Now it was an ever present terror with me lest
I should meet any of my pupils as I went to school in the morning, or
back at midday, with my books in a strap under my arm.
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