"Nay, this is too much!" said the learned man. "It is just as one takes it!"--said the shadow. "It will do you much good to travel!--will you be my shadow?--you shall have everything free on the journey!" "Nay, that is too bad!" said the learned man. "But it is just so with the world!" said the shadow,--"and so it will be!"--and away it went again. The learned man was not at all in the most enviable state; grief and torment followed him, and what he said about the true, and the good, and the beautiful, was, to most persons, like roses for a cow!--he was quite ill at last. "You really look like a shadow!" said his friends to him; and the learned man trembled, for he thought of it. "You must go to a watering-place!" said the shadow, who came and visited him; "there is nothing else for it! I will take you with me for old acquaintance' sake; I will pay the travelling expenses, and you write the descriptions--and if they are a little amusing for me on the way! I will go to a watering-place,--my beard does not grow out as it ought--that is also a sickness--and one must have a beard! Now you be wise and accept the offer; we shall travel as comrades!" And so they travelled; the shadow was master, and the master was the shadow; they drove with each other, they rode and walked together, side by side, before and behind, just as the sun was; the shadow always took care to keep itself in the master's place. Now the learned man didn't think much about that; he was a very kind-hearted man, and particularly mild and friendly, and so he said one day to the shadow: "As we have now become companions, and in this way have grown up together from childhood, shall we not drink '_thou_' together, it is more familiar?" "You are right," said the shadow, who was now the proper master. "It is said in a very straight-forward and well-meant manner. You, as a learned man, certainly know how strange nature is. Some persons cannot bear to touch grey paper, or they become ill; others shiver in every limb if one rub a pane of glass with a nail: I have just such a feeling on hearing you say _thou_ to me; I feel myself as if pressed to the earth in my first situation with you. You see that it is a feeling; that it is not pride: I cannot allow you to say _thou_ to me, but I will willingly say _thou_ to you, so it is half done!" So the shadow said _thou_ to its former master. "This is rather too bad," thought he, that I must say _you_ and he say "thou," but he was now obliged to put up with it. So they came to a watering-place where there were many strangers, and amongst them was a princess, who was troubled with seeing too well; and that was so alarming! She directly observed that the stranger who had just come was quite a different sort of person to all the others;--"He has come here in order to get his beard to grow, they say, but I see the real cause, he cannot cast a shadow."