understanding anything about it; but all these mysteries were very
captivating to me; and with chalk, therefore, I drew a quantity of
flourishes on the door, which were to represent the intestines; and my
description of the heart and the lungs made the deepest impression. I
passed for a remarkably wise child, that would not live long; and they
rewarded my eloquence by telling me tales in return; and thus a world
as rich as that of the thousand and one nights was revealed to me. The
stories told by these old ladies, and the insane figures which I saw
around me in the asylum, operated in the meantime so powerfully upon
me, that when it grew dark I scarcely dared to go out of the house. I
was therefore permitted, generally at sunset, to lay me down in my
parents' bed with its long flowered curtains, because the press-bed in
which I slept could not conveniently be put down so early in the
evening on account of the room it occupied in our small dwelling; and
here, in the paternal bed, lay I in a waking dream, as if the actual
world did not concern me. I was very much afraid of my weak-minded
grandfather. Only once had he ever spoken to me, and then he had made
use of the formal pronoun "you." He employed himself in cutting out of
wood strange figures, men with beasts' heads, and beasts with wings;
these he packed in a basket and carried them out into the country,
where he was everywhere well received by the peasant women, because he
gave to them and their children these strange toys. One day, when he
was returning to Odense, I heard the boys in the street shouting after
him; I hid myself behind a flight of steps in terror, for I knew that I
was of his flesh and blood.

Every circumstance around me tended to excite my imagination. Odense
itself, in those days in which there was not a single steamboat in
existence, and when intercourse with other places was much more rare
than now, was a totally different city to what it is in our day; a