man. There were enough of them in the neighborhood, and the inhabitants
looked up to them; but they were not interesting. They were more or less
another form of drunkard.

To Pelle books were a new power, grown slowly out of his sojourn in
prison. He had sat there alone with his work, thrown on himself for
occupation, and he had examined himself in every detail. It was like
having companionship when he brought to light anything new and strange
in himself; and one day he chanced upon the mistiness of his own being,
and discovered that it consisted of experience that others had gone
through before him. The Bible, which always lay on the prisoner's table
for company, helped him; its words had the sound of a well-known voice
that reminded him strongly of Father Lasse's in his childhood. From the
Bible he went on further and discovered that the serious books were men
who sat in solitude like himself, and spoke out.

Was solitude so dreadful then when you had such company? Pelle was no
longer able to comprehend his own fear of it. As a child he had been a
creature in the widest sense, and found companionship in everything; he
could converse with trees, animals, and stones. Those fibers had
withered, and no longer conveyed nourishment; but then he became one
with the masses, and thought and felt exactly as they did. That was
crumbling away too now; he was being isolated distinctly, bit by bit,
and he was interested in discovering a plan in it. He had made
Nature subject to him even as a child, and had afterward won the masses!
It was solitude now that had to be taken, and he himself was going about
in the midst of it, large and wonderful! It was already leaving
indelible traces in his mind, although he had seen nothing of it yet. He
felt strangely excited, very much as he had felt when, in his childhood,
he arrived in Bornholm with his father and could see nothing, but heard