became keenly interested in it, and before many lessons were over was
very well up in it. As Joergen Lund taught mathematics, so all the other
subjects ought to have been taught. We were obliged to be content with
less.

Lessons might have been a pleasure. They never were, or rather, only the
Danish ones. But in childhood's years, and during the first years of
boyhood they were fertilising. As a boy they hung over me like a dread
compulsion; yet the compulsion was beneficial. It was only when I was
almost fourteen that I began inwardly to rebel against the time which
was wasted, that the stupidest and laziest of the boys might be enabled
to keep up with the industrious and intelligent. There was too much
consideration shown towards those who would not work or could not
understand. And from the time I was sixteen, school was my despair. I
had done with it all, was beyond it all, was too matured to submit to
the routine of lessons; my intellectual pulses no longer beat within the
limits of school. What absorbed my interest was the endeavour to become
master of the Danish language in prose and verse, and musings over the
mystery of existence. In school I most often threw up the sponge
entirely, and laid my head on my arms that I might neither see nor hear
what was going on around me.

There was another reason, besides my weariness of it all, which at this
latter period made my school-going a torture to me. I was by now
sufficiently schooled for my sensible mother to think it would be good
for me to make, if it were but a small beginning, towards earning my own
living. Or rather, she wanted me to earn enough to pay for my amusements
myself. So I tried, with success, to find pupils, and gave them lessons
chiefly on Sunday mornings; but in order to secure them I had called
myself _Studiosus_. Now it was an ever present terror with me lest