The conductor called for fares, and received an
English shilling, which, after some ineffectual
expostulation, he pocketed, but gave no change.
At last after about an hour's journey, the car
stopped, the conductor called out "Central
Park," and Halfdan woke up with a start. He
dismounted with a timid, deliberate step, stared
in dim bewilderment at the long rows of palatial
residences, and a chill sense of loneliness
crept over him. The hopeless strangeness of
everything he saw, instead of filling him with
rapture as he had once anticipated, Sent a cold
shiver to his heart. It is a very large affair,
this world of ours--a good deal larger than it
appeared to him gazing out upon it from his
snug little corner up under the Pole; and it was
as unsympathetic as it was large; he suddenly
felt what he had never been aware of before--
that he was a very small part of it and of very
little account after all. He staggered over to a
bench at the entrance to the park, and sat long
watching the fine carriages as they dashed past
him; he saw the handsome women in brilliant
costumes laughing and chatting gayly; the
apathetic policemen promenading in stoic dignity
up and down upon the smooth pavements; the
jauntily attired nurses, whom in his Norse
innocence he took for mothers or aunts of the chil-
dren, wheeling baby-carriages which to Norse
eyes seemed miracles of dainty ingenuity, under
the shady crowns of the elm-trees. He did not
know how long he had been sitting there, when
a little bright-eyed girl with light kid gloves, a
small blue parasol and a blue polonaise, quite a
lady of fashion en miniature, stopped in front
of him and stared at him in shy wonder.
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