do." And this old and ready phrase gave him the strength
to stifle his rage and indignation.

II

The day was as bright and white, but the spring was already advanced.
The wet soil smelt of spring. Clear cold water ran everywhere from
under the loose, thawing snow. The branches of the trees were springy
and elastic. For miles and miles around, the country opened up in
clear azure stretches.

Yet the clearness and the joy of the spring day were not in the
village. They were somewhere outside the village, where there were no
people--in the fields, the woods and the mountains. In the village the
air was stifling, heavy and terrible as in a nightmare.

Gabriel Andersen stood in the road near a crowd of dark, sad,
absent-minded people and craned his neck to see the preparations for
the flogging of seven peasants.

They stood in the thawing snow, and Gabriel Andersen could not
persuade himself that they were people whom he had long known and
understood. By that which was about to happen to them, the shameful,
terrible, ineradicable thing that was to happen to them, they were
separated from all the rest of the world, and so were unable to feel
what he, Gabriel Andersen, felt, just as he was unable to feel what
they felt. Round them were the soldiers, confidently and beautifully
mounted on high upon their large steeds, who tossed their wise heads
and turned their dappled wooden faces slowly from side to side,
looking contemptuously at him, Gabriel Andersen, who was soon to
behold this horror, this disgrace, and would do nothing, would not
dare to do anything. So it seemed to Gabriel Andersen; and a sense of
cold, intolerable shame gripped him as between two clamps of ice
through which he could see everything without being able to move, cry
out or utter a groan.

They took the first peasant. Gabriel Andersen saw his strange,
imploring, hopeless look. His lips moved, but no sound was heard, and
his eyes wandered. There was a bright gleam in them as in the eyes of
a madman. His mind, it was evident, was no longer able to comprehend
what was happening.

And so terrible was that face, at once full of reason and of madness,
that Andersen felt relieved when they put him face downward on the
snow and, instead of the fiery eyes, he saw his bare back
glistening--a senseless, shameful, horrible sight.

The large, red-faced soldier in a red cap pushed toward him, looked
down at his body with seeming delight, and then crie