I studied their Juttish,
and laughed heartily at their keen wit. The country inns were often
over-full, so that I was obliged to sleep on the floor; my wanderings
were often somewhat exhausting, as there were constant showers, and the
night rain had soaked the roads. I drove in a peasant's cart to Mariager
to visit my friend Emil Petersen, who was in the office of the district
judge of that place, making his home with his brother-in-law and his
very pretty sister, and I stayed for a few days with him. Here I became
acquainted with a little out-of-the-world Danish town. The priest and
his wife were an interesting and extraordinary couple. The priest, the
before-mentioned Pastor Ussing, a little, nervous, intelligent and
unworldly man, was a pious dreamer, whose religion was entirely
rationalistic. Renan's recently published _Life of Jesus_ was so
far from shocking him that the book seemed to him in all essentials to
be on the right track. He had lived in the Danish West Indies, and there
he had become acquainted with his wife, a lady with social triumphs
behind her, whose charms he never wearied of admiring. The mere way in
which she placed her hat upon her head, or threw a shawl round her
shoulders, could make him fall into ecstasies, even though he only
expressed his delight in her in half-facetious terms.
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