Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/163

 had, on the contrary, for some time occupied his mind to an extraordinary extent. He had made up his mind to follow the advice the weaver gave him at their first interview, and talk to them about himself. He would try to draw a rough sketch for them of the life of a town-bred child during its growth, and give an account of the impressions to which such a child was subjected, so as to show them the conditions of life and the influences which had operated on his own development, and which had at last brought him to the parting of the ways where he now stood.

He began by telling them a little story. It was the story of a young princess who was one day presented with a lovely flower by a lover. She was at first delighted with it, and was about to fasten it in her bosom. But when she discovered that the flower was no artificial imitation of nature, made of silk or painted feathers, but a real, living rose, she threw it aside angrily, and told her maid to sweep the ugly peasant's flower away at once.

This story, he said, seemed to him, applied to our times, to contain a deep and sad truth. In our time it was not alone the young, spoiled princess who thus scornfully rejected the flowers of life—no, the whole so-called modern culture, in its progress in the large towns, was an acknowledged struggle to corrupt God's earthly gifts, an arrogant attempt to change—or, as it was