the movement of thronging life behind the mist. A new and unknown world,
full of wonders and throbbing with anticipation, would meet him in
there.

Pelle's action was not due to his own volition. He might as well try to
lift himself up by his hair as determine that now he would be a human
being by himself. It was an awakening of new powers. He no longer let
sunshine and rain pass unnoticed over his head. A strange thing happened
to him--he looked wonderingly at everything that he had formerly passed
by as commonplace, and saw it all in a new, brilliant light. He had to
go all over it from the beginning, look at every detail. How wonderfully
everything was connected, sorrow and joy and apparent trifles, to make
him, Pelle, who had ruled over hundreds of thousands and yet had to go
to prison in order to feel himself rich! Something had been ignited in
him that could never be extinguished, a sacred fire to which everything
must bear fuel, whether it would or not. He could not be conquered now;
he drew strength from infinity itself.

The bare cell--three paces one way and six the other--with its tiny
window and the mysterious peephole in the door which was like a watchful
eye upon one always, how much it had held! It had always been the lot of
the poor man to create worlds out of the void, beautiful mirages which
suddenly broke and threw him back even poorer and more desolate. But
this lasted. All the threads of life seemed to be joined together in the
bare cell. It was like the dark, underground place in large buildings
where the machinery is kept that admits and excludes light and heat to
the whole block. There he discovered how rich and varied life is.

Pelle went about in a peculiarly elevated frame of mind. He felt that
something greater and finer than himself had taken up its abode within