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vest pocket. You may fall on the road, the vial breaks, splinters penetrate your body, and the poison enters the blood stream. There’s some danger wherever you go. And so what? There is one road, however, where nobody takes a tumble—the one that Gladstone walks. I can picture Gladstone’s shrewd householder’s expression as he walks down that road: avoiding missteps, joining hands with Providence to protect him. And now he has gotten over his cold, too. Gladstone will live until he dies a natural death from too much well-being.
    Pastor Karlsen, why did you poke your face into a puddle? Should we let the question remain open, whether it was to conceal the death agony, or whether the convulsions forced you to do so? At any rate, you chose your time like a child afraid of the dark, a clear day, the hour of noon, and you lay there with a farewell note in your hand. Poor Karlsen, poor Karlsen!
    And why did you take to the wood with your brilliant little enterprise? Did you know the wood, and did it mean more to you than a field, a road, or a lake? “The little boy walked in the wood the livelong day, la la la la.” There are the Vardal Woods, for instance, on the way up from Gjøvik. You lie there dozing, leaving the world behind; you stare at the sky, peering like hell into the heavens, heh-heh, so that you can almost hear the tittle-tattle they’re whispering about you up there: That one there, says my dear departed mother, why, if he comes here I’ll be leaving, she says, prepared to cast a vote of no confidence. I reply with a heh-heh and say, Pst, don’t let me disturb you, just don’t let me disturb you! And I say this sufficiently loud to attract a modicum of attention from a couple of she-angels, venerated Jairus’s daughter and Svava Bjørnson. Heh-heh-heh.
    What the hell do I lie here laughing at? Is it supposed to show my superiority? Only children should be allowed to laugh, and very young girls, nobody else. Laughter is a survival from simian times, a disgusting and shameless sound that comes out the wrong way. It’s 2 expelled from some place or other in my body when I get chucked under the chin. What was it Hauge, the butcher, told me once, Hauge who had a robust laughter of his own and used it to throw his weight around? He said that nobody who was all there—
    Ah, what a delightful child he had! It was raining the day I met her on the street; she had a pail in her hand and was crying, having lost the money to buy dinner in the Steam Kitchen. My dear departed mother, did you see from your heaven that I didn’t have a single penny to cheer up the child with? That I tore my hair in the street because I didn’t have an øre? Then the band passed by. A pretty nurse turned around and gave me a glistening look; then she went quietly home, her head bowed, probably lamenting that glistening look she had given me. But at that moment a bearded man in a soft felt hat grabbed my arm, or I would have been run over. I’ll say I would have—.
    Sh-sh! One-two-three; how slowly it strikes! Four—five—six—seven—eight; is it eight already? Nine—ten. It’s already ten o’clock! Then I must get up. 3 Where did that clock strike? It couldn’t be in the café, could it? Well, it doesn’t matter, not at all, not at all. That scene in the café last night was quite amusing, wasn’t it? Miniman was trembling, I came in the nick of time. He would definitely have ended up drinking that beer with the cigar ash and matches in it. Well, so what? May I ask you, brazen brute that you are: so what? Why do I meddle in other people’s affairs? Why did I come to this town in the first place? Was it because of some cosmic disaster, because of Gladstone’s cold, for example? Heh-heh-heh, God help you, child, if you tell the truth: that actually you were on your way home but were suddenly so deeply moved at the sight of this town—small and miserable as it is—that you almost wept with a strange, mysterious joy when