“If he had had one eye,” says Kevenhüller, “I would have thought that you had killed the old one himself, he is so big; but this one has no wound or inflammation about his eyes, so it cannot be the same.” Fuchs swears over his stupidity, but then his face lights up so that he is really handsome. The great bear has not been killed by another man’s bullet. “Lord God, how good thou art!” he says, and folds his hands. CHAPTER IX THE AUCTION AT BJÖRNE We young people often had to wonder at the old people’s tales. “Was there a ball every day, as long as your radiant youth lasted?” we asked them. “Was life then one long adventure?” “Were all young women beautiful and lovely in those days, and did every feast end by Gösta Berling carrying off one of them?” Then the old people shook their worthy heads, and began to tell of the whirring of the spinning-wheel and the clatter of the loom, of work in the kitchen, of the thud of the flail and the path of the axe through the forest; but it was not long before they harked back to the old theme. Then sledges drove up to the door, horses speeded away through the dark woods with the joyous young people; then the dance whirled and the violin-strings snapped. Adventure’s wild chase roared about Löfven’s long lake with thunder and crash. Far away could its noise be heard. The forest tottered and fell, all the powers of destruction were let loose; fire flamed out, floods laid waste the land, wild beasts roamed starving about the farmyards. Under the light-footed horses’ hoofs all quiet happiness was trampled to dust. Wherever the hunt rushed by, men’s hearts flamed up in madness, and the women in pale terror had to flee from their homes. And we young ones sat wondering, silent, troubled, but blissful. “What people!” we thought. “We shall never see their like.” “Did the people of those days never _think_ of what they were doing?” we asked. “Of course they thought, children,” answered the old people. “But not as we think,” we insisted. But the old people did not understand what we meant. But we thought of the strange spirit of self-consciousness which had already taken possession of us. We thought of him, with his eyes of ice and his long, bent fingers,—he who sits there in the soul’s darkest corner and picks to pieces our being, just as old women pick to pieces bits of silk and wool. Bit by bit had the long, hard, crooked fingers picked, until our whole self lay there like a pile of rags, and our best impulses, our most original thoughts, everything which we had done and said, had been examined, investigated, picked to pieces, and the icy eyes had looked on, and the toothless mouth had laughed in derision and whispered,— “See, it is rags, only rags.”