He and his father were now friends for the first time, and he loved him for his condescension.

One night his father's voice awoke him from sleep. He started up, and found it dark in the room. Through the darkness he heard a deep trembling voice, "Come to mother's death-bed!" It went through him like a flash of lightning. He froze and shivered while he dressed, the skin of his head felt ice-cold, his eyes were wide-open and streaming with tears, so that the flame of the lamp looked like a red bladder.

Then they stood round the sick-bed and wept for one, two, three hours. The night crept slowly onward. His mother was unconscious and knew no one. The death-struggle, with rattling in the throat, and cries for help, had commenced. The little ones were not aroused. John thought of all the sins which he had committed, and found no good deeds to counterbalance them. After three hours his tears ceased, and his thoughts began to take various directions. The process of dying was over. "How will it be," he asked himself, "when mother is no longer there?" Nothing but emptiness and desolation, without comfort or compensation—a deep gloom of wretchedness in which he searched for some point of light. His eye fell on his mother's chest of drawers, on which stood a plaster statuette of Linnæus with a flower in his hand. There was the only advantage which this boundless misfortune brought with it—he would get the ring. He saw it in imagination on his hand. "That is in memory of my mother," he would be able to say, and he would weep at the recollection of her, but he could not suppress the thought, "A gold ring looks fine after all." Shame! Who could entertain such thoughts at his mother's death-bed? A brain that was drunk with sleep? A child which had wept itself out? Oh, no, an heir. Was he more avaricious than others? Had he a natural tendency to greed? No, for then he would never have related the matter, but he bore it in memory his whole life long; it kept on turning up, and when he thought of it in sleepless nights, and hours of weariness, he felt the flush mount into his cheeks. Then he instituted an examination of himself and his conduct, and blamed himself as the meanest of all men. It was not till he was older and had come to know a great number of men, and studied the processes of thought, that he came to the conclusion that the brain is a strange thing which goes its own way, and there is a great similarity among men in the double life which they lead, the outward and the inward, the life of speech and that of thought.

John was a compound of romanticism, pietism, realism, and naturalism. Therefore he was never anything but a patchwork. He certainly did not exclusively think about the wretched ornament. The whole matter was only a momentary distraction of two minutes' duration after months of sorrow, and when at last there was stillness in the room, and his father said, "Mother is dead," he was not to be comforted. He shrieked like one drowning. How can death bring such profound despair to those who hope to meet again? It must needs press hard on faith when the annihilation of personality takes place with such inflexible consistency before our eyes. John's father, who generally had the outward imperturbability of the Icelander, was now softened. He took his sons by the hands and said: "God has visited us; we will now hold together like friends. Men go about in their self-sufficiency, and believe they are enough for themselves; then comes a blow, and we see how we all need one another. We will be sincere and considerate with each other."