Up in the country, where a man was appraised according to the number
of his shirts, such a thing would have been impossible. But here in
town people did not regard such matters so strictly.

He was no longer beside himself with astonishment at the number of
people--respectable folk for the most part--who had no abiding place
anywhere, but all through the year drifted in the most casual manner
from one spot to another. Yet the men looked contented, had wives
and children, went out on Sundays, and amused themselves; and after
all why should one behave as if the world was coming to an end
because one hadn't a barrel of salt pork or a clamp of potatoes to
see one through the winter? Recklessness was finally Pelle's refuge
too; when all the lights seemed to have gone out of the future it
helped him to take up the fairy-tale of life anew, and lent a glamor
to naked poverty. Imagination entered even into starvation: are you
or are you not going to die of it?

Pelle was poor enough for everything to be still before him, and
he possessed the poor man's alert imagination; the great world and
the romance of life were the motives that drew him through the void,
that peculiar music of life which is never silent, but murmurs to
the reckless and the careful alike. Of the world he knew well enough
that it was something incomprehensibly vast--something that was
always receding; yet in eighty days one could travel right round it,
to the place where men walk about with their heads downward, and
back again, and experience all its wonders. He himself had set out
into this incomprehensible world, and here he was, stranded in
this little town, where there was never a crumb to feed a hungry
imagination; nothing but a teeming confusion of petty cares. One
felt the cold breath of the outer winds, and the dizziness of great