"
It was the voice of the plausible, easy-going fisherman again.
My hand was on the latch. "I am not angry; I would rather be friends," I
said with averted face, as we were returning through the dark
"keeping-rooms."
"When you get out of this realm of myths and missions, and general dread
and discomfort," said Mr. Rollin, "on to comprehensible soil again, where
ordinary sinners are sure of some sort of a footing,--and bad as a fellow
is he knows there are plenty more like him,--then I shan't appear to you
in such a deucedly poor light as I do now, a doubtful sort of pearl in a
setting of isolated cedars, with my beauty and my genius and my heavenly
aspirations all unappreciated, or made to descend as a greater measure of
condemnation on my devoted auburn head. Truly, I believe that an evil
star attends my course in Wallencamp. My own ideas seem strange to me. I
cannot grasp them. My language is wild and disconnected, I fancy, like
that of the early Norse poets. When I meet you in the world, I shall hope
to recover some of the old-time coherence and felicity of speech which I
remember to have heard practised among the world's people; and it isn't
long now, thank Heaven, before you'll leave Wallencamp behind you.
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