Page:A Picture-book without Pictures and Other Stories (1848).djvu/133

 To be sure, the side next the fire was half roasted; but then, in this world, people must learn to turn and twist themselves about, and I turned myself like a sunflower.

The evenings were somewhat long; but then the teeth took it into their heads to get up a nervous concert, and it was extraordinary with what alacrity the proposal was accepted. A downright Danish toothache cannot compare itself to an Italian one. Here the pain played upon the very fangs of the teeth, as if there sate a Liszt or a Thalberg at them; now it thundered in the foreground, now in the background. There was an accordance and strength in the whole thing which at last drove me beside myself.

Besides the evening concerts, there were also nocturnal concerts; and during such a one, while the windows rattled in the storm, and rain poured down in torrents, I threw a half-melancholy glance upon my night-lamp. My writing implements stood just by, and I saw, quite plainly, that the pen was dancing along over the paper as if it were guided by an invisible hand; but it was not so; it was guided by its own hand; it wrote from dicta-