etent to read thee," and then I sat down in right
earnest, comparing every line in the one version with the corresponding
one in the other; and I passed entire nights in this manner, till I was
almost blind, and the task was tedious enough at first, but I quailed
not, and soon began to make progress. And at first I had a misgiving
that the old book might not prove a Danish book, but was soon reassured
by reading many words in the Bible which I remembered to have seen in the
book; and then I went on right merrily, and I found that the language
which I was studying was by no means a difficult one, and in less than a
month I deemed myself able to read the book.

Anon, I took the book from the closet, and proceeded to make myself
master of its contents; I had some difficulty, for the language of the
book, though in the main the same as the language of the Bible, differed
from it in some points, being apparently a more ancient dialect; by
degrees, however, I overcame this difficulty, and I understood the
contents of the book, and well did they correspond with all those ideas
in which I had indulged connected with the Danes. For the book was a
book of ballads, about the deeds of knights and champions, and men of
huge sature; ballads which from time immemorial had been sung in the
North, and which some two centuries before the time of which I am
speaking had been collected by one Anders Vedel, who lived with a certain
Tycho Brahe, and assisted him in making observations upon the heavenly
bodies, at a place called Uranias Castle, on the little island of Hveen,
in the Cattegat.

CHAPTER XXIII.

It might be some six months after the events last recorded, that two
individuals were seated together in a certain room, in a certain street
of the old town which I have so frequently had occasion to mention in the
preceding pages; one of them was an elderly, and the other a very young
man, and they sat on either side of the fire-place, beside a table, on
which were fruit and wine; the room was a small one, and in its furniture
exhibited nothing remarkable. Over the mantelpiece, however, hung a
small picture with naked figures in the foreground, and with much foliage
behind. It might not have struck every beholder, for it looked old and
smoke-dried; but a connoisseur, on inspecting it closely, would have
pronounced it to be a Judgment of Paris, and a masterpiece of the Flemish
School.

The forehead of the elder individual wa