Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/126

 ing colours flowed into their blue, shining valleys just like a fluid which suddenly finds a canal and draws out the picture in an elongated distortion, until everything was jumbled up in a vibrating mixture of tongue-shaped and twisted spiral colours, all light and clear as glass.

Old Hertz was very lively, and talked untiringly about the wonders of Prague; about the peculiar Teyn Church, where my famous countryman Tycho Brahe was buried, about the dirty Jewish quarter with its gloomy Synagogue, and the overgrown churchyard, where the plain Oriental grave-stones stood slanting and leaning, and crowded so closely together that they looked as if they would push one another out of the ground. About Hradschin, the Bohemian Acropolis, and its terrace-shaped Palace-gardens climbing up the side of the rock. Of all those wonders which I should be able to admire the next day, if I allowed myself to be persuaded to go on with them to-night. For he pretended all the time to hope that I would eventually give way, and good-naturedly enjoyed listening to the many feeble excuses I made to his reiterated invitations.

But he always wound up by saying, "Yes, yes, it is also a good thing that Minna gets company, though I am quite sure that she would not be afraid to return alone." Then of course she began to assure us how willing she was to do this daring act, and that I was "on no account to give up this enjoyable trip for her sake, when there was such a good chance to take it with pleasant companions." While teasing me in this way she laughed with her half-closed blinking eyes, so that in the end I did not know what to answer. We, in our turn, amused ourselves heartily over the fact that the good-natured man, while meaning to make fun of us, was in reality himself deceived, as he could not have any notion of how on this, of all