Pelle went stupidly across the room and sat down--it was all the
same to him. But he leaped into the air with a yell of pain, looked
malevolently about him, and in a moment he had a hammer in his hand.
But he dropped it again, and now he cried--wept buckets of tears.

"What the devil are you doing to him now?"

The young master came out of the cutting-out room. "What dirty
tricks are you hatching now?" He ran his hand over the seat of the
stool; it was studded with broken awl-points. "You are barbarous
devils; any one would think he was among a lot of savages!"

"What a weakling!" sneered Jeppe. "In these days a man can't take
a boy as apprentice and inoculate him a bit against boils! One ought
to anoint the boobies back and front with honey, perhaps, like the
kings of Israel? But you are a freethinker!"

"You get out of this, father!" shouted Master Andres, quite beside
himself. "You get out of this, father!" He trembled, and his face
was quite gray. And then he pushed the old man out of the room
before he had struck Pelle on the shoulder and received him properly
into the handicraft.

Pelle sat there and reflected. He was altogether disillusioned. All
the covert allusions had evoked something terrifying, but at the
same time impressive. In his imagination the ordeal had grown into
something that constituted the great barrier of his life, so that
one passed over to the other side as quite a different being; it
was something after the fashion of the mysterious circumcision in
the Bible, a consecration to new things. And now the whole thing