was just a spitefully devised torture!

The young master threw him a pair of children's shoes, which had to
be soled. So he was admitted to that department, and need no longer
submit to preparing waxed-ends for the others! But the fact did
not give him any pleasure. He sat there struggling with something
irrational that seemed to keep on rising deep within him; when no
one was looking he licked his fingers and drew them over his neck.
He seemed to himself like a half-stupefied cat which had freed
itself from the snare and sat there drying its fur.

Out of doors, under the apple-trees, the sunlight lay green and
golden, and a long way off, in the skipper's garden, three brightly
dressed girls were walking and playing; they seemed to Pelle like
beings out of another world. "Fortune's children on the sunbright
shore," as the song had it. From time to time a rat made its
appearance behind the pigsty, and went clattering over the great
heap of broken glass that lay there. The pig stood there gobbling
down its spoiled potatoes with that despairing noise that put an end
to all Pelle's proud dreams of the future, while it filled him with
longing--oh, such a mad longing!

And everything that possibly could do so made its assault upon him
at this moment when he was feeling particularly victorious; the
miseries of his probation here in the workshop, the street urchins,
the apprentices, who would not accept him as one of themselves, and
all the sharp edges and corners which he was continually running
up against in this unfamiliar world. And then the smelly workshop
itself, where never a ray of sunlight entered. And no one here
seemed to respect anything.