With a slow step he enters the hall. Only the school porter is there, who laughs at him, and writes his name on the blackboard under the heading "Late." A painful hour follows, and then loud cries are heard in the lower school, and the blows of a cane fall thickly. It is the headmaster, who has made an onslaught on the late-comers or takes his exercise on them. John bursts into tears and trembles all over—not from fear of pain but from a feeling of shame to think that he should be fallen upon like an animal doomed to slaughter, or a criminal. Then the door opens. He starts up, but it is only the chamber-maid who comes in to trim the lamp.

"Good-day, John," she says. "You are too late; you are generally so punctual. How is Hanna?"

John tells her that Hanna is well, and that the snow was very deep in the Norrtullsgata.

"Good heavens! You have not come by Norrtullsgata?"

Then the headmaster opens the door and enters.

"Well, you!"

"You must not be angry with John, sir! He lives in Norrtullsgata."

"Silence, Karin!" says the headmaster, "and go.—Well," he continues: "you live in the Norrtullsgata. That is certainly a good way. But still you ought to look out for the time."

Then he turns and goes. John owed it to Karin that he escaped a flogging, and to fate that Hanna had chanced to be Karin's fellow-servant at the headmaster's. Personal influence had saved him from an injustice.

And then the school and the teaching! Has not enough been written about Latin and the cane? Perhaps! In later years he skipped all passages in books which dealt with reminiscences of school life, and avoided all books on that subject. When he grew up his worst nightmare, when he had eaten something indigestible at night or had a specially troublesome day, was to dream that he was back at school.

The relation between pupil and teacher is such, that the former gets as one-sided a view of the latter as a child of its parent. The first teacher John had looked like the ogre in the story of Tom Thumb. He flogged continually, and said he would make the boys crawl on the floor and "beat them to pulp" if they did their exercises badly.

He was not, however, really a bad fellow, and John and his school-fellows presented him with an album when he left Stockholm. Many thought well of him, and considered him a fine character. He ended as a gentleman farmer and the hero of an Ostgothland idyll.

Another was regarded as a monster of malignity. He really seemed to beat the boys because he liked it. He would commence his lesson by saying, "Bring the cane," and then try to find as many as he could who had an ill-prepared lesson. He finally committed suicide in consequence of a scathing newspaper article. Half a year before that, John, then a student, had met him in Uggelvikswald, and felt moved by his old teacher's complaints over the ingratitude of the world. A year previous he had received at Christmas time a box of stones, sent from an old pupil in Australia. But the colleagues of the stern teacher used to speak of him as a good-natured fool at whom they made jests. So many points of view, so many differing judgments! But to this day old boys of the Clara School cannot meet each other without expressing their horror and indignation at his unmercifulness, although they all acknowledge that he was an excellent teacher.