they saw Pelle, they held their clenched fist under their noses,
nodded to him in a provocative manner, and sang--

"The cobbler has a pitchy nose,
The more he wipes it the blacker it grows!"

Pelle pretended not to see them, but he secretly ticked them all
off in his mind. It was his sincere intention to wipe them all off
the face of the earth.

Suddenly they all ran into the street, where a tremendous,
monotonous voice lifted itself and flowed abroad. This was the crazy
watchmaker; he was standing on his high steps, crying damnation on
the world at large.

Pelle knew perfectly well that the man was crazy, and in the words
which he so ponderously hurled at the town there was not the
slightest meaning. But they sounded wonderfully fine notwithstanding,
and the "ordeal by wax" was hanging over him like a sort of last
judgment. Involuntarily, he began to turn cold at the sound of this
warning voice, which uttered such solemn words and had so little
meaning, just as he did at the strong language in the Bible. It was
just the voice that frightened him; it was such a terrible voice,
such a voice as one might hear speaking out of the clouds; the sort
of voice, in short, that made the knees of Moses and Paul give under
them; a portentous voice, such as Pelle himself used to hear coming
out of the darkness at Stone Farm when a quarrel was going on.

Only the knee-strap of little Nikas, the journeyman, kept him from
jumping up then and there and throwing himself down like Paul. This