the cabin; she whom he had regarded as a rich and noble lady. 'I
am sunk in shame!' said she. 'No one esteems me; I no longer esteem
myself. Oh, save me, Soeren! I have honestly divided my money with
you; I yet am possessed of forty dollars. Marry me, and take me
away out of this wo, and out of this misery! Take me to a place
where nobody will know me, where you may not be ashamed of me. I
will work for you like a slave, till the blood comes out at my
finger-ends. Oh, take me away with you! In a year's time it may be
too late.'

"'Should I take you to my old father and mother?' said the sailor.

"'I will kiss the dust from their feet they may beat me, and I will
bear it without a murmur--will patiently bear every blow. I am
already old, that I know. I shall soon be eight-and-twenty; but it
is an act of mercy, which I beseech of you. If you will not do it,
nobody else will; and I think I must drink--drink till my brain
reels--and I forget what I have made myself!'

"'Is that the very important thing that you have got to tell me?'
remarked the sailor, with a cold indifference.

"Her tears, her sighs, her words of despair, sank deep into
Christian's heart. A visionary image had vanished, and with its
vanishing he saw the dark side of a naked reality.

"He found himself again alone.

"A few days after this, the ice had to be hewed away from the
channel. Christian and the sailor struck their axes deeply into the
firm ice, so that it broke into great pieces. Something white hung
fast to the ice in the opening; the sailor enlarged the opening,
and then a female corpse presented itself, dressed in white as for
a ball. She had amber leads round her neck, gold earrings, and she
held her hands closely folded against her breast as if for prayer.
It was Steffen-Margaret."

"O.T." commences in a more lively style than either of the preceding
novels, but soon becomes in fact the dullest and most wearisome of the
three. During a portion of this novel he seems to have taken for his
model of narrative the "Wilhelm Meister" of Goethe; but the calm
domestic manner which is tolerable in the clear-sighted man, who we know
can rise nobly from it when he pleases, accords ill enough with the
bewildered, most displeasing, and half intelligible story which Andersen
has here to relate.

We have o