with vertigo. Now and then, when luck had favoured me, I had managed to get five shillings for a feuilleton from some newspaper or other.
It grew lighter and lighter, and I took to reading the advertisements near the door. I could even make out the grinning lean letters of "winding-sheets to be had at Miss Andersens" on the right of it. That occupied me for a long while. I heard the clock below strike eight as I got up and put on my clothes.
I opened the window and looked out. From where I was standing I had a view of a clothesline and an open field. Farther away lay the ruins of a burnt-out smithy, which some labourers were busy clearing away. I leant with my elbows resting on the window-frame and gazed into open space. It promised to be a clear day—autumn, that tender, cool time of the year, when all things change their colour, and die, had come to us. The ever-increasing noise in the streets lured me out. The bare room, the floor of which rocked up and down with every step I took across it, seemed like a gaping sinister coffin. There was no proper fastening to the door, either, and no stove. I used to lie on my socks at night to dry them a
