My fingers still smell of strawberries.
Went out at night. Pictures of my fancy rose around me. A Summer's
night, but as cold as Winter, the clouds banked up on the horizon.
Suppose in the wind and cold and dark I were to meet one I know! Over
the corn the wind whispered or whistled a name. The waves dashed in a
short little beat against the shore. It is only the sea that is as
Nature made it; the land in a thousand ways is robbed of its virginity
by human hands, but the sea now is as it was thousands of years ago. A
thick fog rose up. The birches bent their heads and went to sleep. But I
can hear the grass grow and the stars sing.
Gradually my association with Ludvig David grew more and more intimate,
and the latter proved himself a constant friend. A few years after our
friendship had begun, when things were looking rather black for me, my
father having suffered great business losses, and no longer being able
to give me the same help as before, Ludvig David invited me to go and
live altogether at his father's house, and be like a son there--an offer
which I of course refused, but which affected me deeply, especially when
I learnt that it had only been made after the whole family had been
consulted.
X.
In November, 1859, at exactly the same time as Kappers' "literary and
scientific" society was started, a fellow-student named Groenbeck, from
Falster, who knew the family of Caspar Paludan-Mueller, the historian,
proposed my joining another little society of young students, of whom
Groenbeck thought very highly on account of their altogether unusual
knowledge of books and men.
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