"Yes, but play may become earnest," said the captain.

"That depends on us," answered John, and obeyed. But he thought him fussy for interfering in such trifles, and believed that he noticed a certain dislike in his superior towards himself. The former was called "magister," because he wrote for the papers, but he was not even a student. "There it is," he thought, "he wants to humiliate me." And from that time he watched him closely. Their mutual antipathy lasted through their lives.

The volunteer movement was in the first place the result of the Danish-German War, and, though transitory, was in some degree advantageous. It kept the young men occupied, and did away, to a certain extent, with the military prestige of the army, as the lower classes discovered that soldiering was not such a difficult matter after all. The insight thus gained caused a widespread resistance to the introduction of the Prussian system of compulsory service which was much mooted at the time, since Oscar II., when visiting Berlin, had expressed to the Emperor William his hope that Swedish and Prussian troops would once more be brothers-in-arms.

IX - With Strangers

*

One of his bold dreams had been fulfilled: he had found a situation for the summer. Why had he not found one sooner? He had not dared to hope for it, and, therefore, had never sought it, from fear of meeting with a refusal. A disappointed hope was the worst thing he could imagine. But now, all at once, Fortune shook her cornucopia over him; the post he had obtained was in the finest situation that he knew—the Stockholm archipelago—on the most beautiful of all the islands, Sotaskär. He now liked aristocrats. His step-mother's ill-treatment of him, his relations' perpetual watching to discover arrogance in him, where there was only superiority of intelligence, generosity, and self-sacrifice, the attempts of his volunteer comrades to oppress him, had driven him out of the class to which he naturally belonged. He did not think or feel any more as they did; he had another religion, and another view of life. The well-regulated behaviour and confident bearing of his aristocratic friends satisfied his æsthetic sense; his education had brought him nearer to them, and alienated him from the lower classes. The aristocrats seemed to him less proud than the middle class. They did not oppress, but prized culture and talent; they were democratic in their behaviour towards him, for they treated him as an equal, whereas his own relatives regarded him as a subordinate and inferior. Fritz, for example, who was the son of a miller in the country, visited at the house of a lord-in-waiting, and played in a comedy with his sons before the director of the Theatre Royal, who offered him an engagement. No one asked whose son he was. But when Fritz came to a dance at John's house, he was carefully inspected behind and before, and great satisfaction was caused when some relative imparted the information that his father had once been a miller's servant.