rything, for he
gets it from the air, which encircles all things, and the church bell
understands his tongue, and rings it out into the world, 'Ding-dong!
ding-dong!'

"But it was too much for me to hear and to know; I was not able any
longer to ring it out. I became so tired, so heavy, that the beam
broke, and I flew out into the gleaming Au where the water is
deepest, and where the Au-mann lives, solitary and alone; and year by
year I tell him what I have heard and what I know. Ding-dong!
ding-dong!"

Thus it sounds complainingly out of the bell-deep in the Odense-Au:
that is what grandmother told us.

But the schoolmaster says that there was not any bell that rung down
there, for that it could not do so; and that no Au-mann dwelt yonder,
for there was no Au-mann at all! And when all the other church bells
are sounding sweetly, he says that it is not really the bells that are
sounding, but that it is the air itself which sends forth the notes;
and grandmother said to us that the bell itself said it was the air
who told it him, consequently they are agreed on that point, and this
much is sure. "Be cautious, cautious, and take good heed to thyself,"
they both say.

The air knows everything. It is around us, it is in us, it talks of
our thoughts and of our deeds, and it speaks longer of them than does
the bell down in the depths of the Odense-Au where the Au-mann dwells;
it rings it out into the vault of heaven, far, far out, for ever and
ever, till the heaven bells sound "Ding-dong! ding-dong!"

THE PUPPET SHOWMAN.

On board the steamer was an elderly man with such a merry face that,
if it did not belie him, he must have been the happiest fellow in
creation. And, indeed, he declared he was the happiest man; I heard it
out of his own mouth. He was a Dane, a travelling theatre director. He
had all his company with him in a large box, for he was proprietor of
a puppet-show. His inborn cheerfulness, he said, had been _purified_
by a Polytechnic candidate, and the experiment had made him completely
happy. I did not at first understand all this, but afterwards he
explained the whole story to me, and here it is. He told me:

[Illustration: THE ANIMATED PUPPETS.]

"It was in the little town of Slagelse I gave a representation in the
hall of the posting-house, and had a brilliant audience, entirely a
juvenile one, with the exception of two respectable matrons. All at
once a person in black, of student-like app