=The After-Odour.=--The teacher continued: "As I went thence, I felt the happiness of the present. All the past was only the dark background. I was thankful in my heart, when I remembered all I had come through without perishing. When I came home, I learnt through the telephone that my worst enemy had died on the morning of this very day. His death-struggle was taking place at the very time that I made the pilgrimage through my past life. I reflected: Why should I pass through my agony just when he died? He was a 'black man'[1] with an obsolete materialistic view of things which he thought was modern; a literary huckster who wrote reviews of marchionesses' rubbishy books, in order to be invited to their castles, and praised his associates as long as they consorted with him; the partisan of a coterie and a log-roller. "I had never come into personal contact with him, but once, a long time ago, he had called himself my pupil. He could not however grow, nor follow me upwards. It was now as though my old self had died in him. Perhaps therefore I suffered his death and felt it just now. But why the perfume? That I know not. But when I learnt that the deceased decomposed so rapidly that he had to be buried at once, I could not help connecting the perfume with his dissolution. When, eight days afterwards, I read a posthumous review by the deceased of my last work, and saw that he regretted that I was not a pagan and lamented my defection from the Lord of Dung, it was as though I sniffed an after-odour from the dunghole, and I seized the perfume-flask in good earnest." [Footnote 1: Strindberg's expression for a free-thinker.]