Pelle turned crimson. He had not yet succeeded in making a beginning,
and already he had been caught behaving like a blockhead.

"Well, well, well," said Klaus, in a good-humored tone, "you are no
bigger fool than all the rest. But if you'll take my advice, you'll
go to shoemaker Jeppe Kofod as apprentice; I am going straight to
his place to fetch manure, and I know he's looking for an apprentice.
Then you needn't go floundering about uncertain-like, and you can
drive right up to the door like the quality."

Pelle winced all over. Never in his life had it entered his head
that he could ever become a shoemaker. Even back there on the land,
where people looked up to the handicrafts, they used always to say,
if a boy had not turned out quite right: "Well, we can always make
a cobbler or a tailor of him!" But Pelle was no cripple, that he
must lead a sedentary life indoors in order to get on at all; he was
strong and well-made. What he would be--well, that certainly lay in
the hands of fortune; but he felt very strongly that it ought to be
something active, something that needed courage and energy. And in
any case he was quite sure as to what he did not want to be. But as
they jolted through the town, and Pelle--so as to be beforehand with
the great world--kept on taking off his cap to everybody, although
no one returned his greeting, his spirits began to sink, and a sense
of his own insignificance possessed him. The miserable cart, at
which all the little town boys laughed and pointed with their
fingers, had a great deal to do with this feeling.

"Take off your cap to a pack like that!" grumbled Klaus; "why,
only look how puffed up they behave, and yet everything they've got