There he was exhibited to the passers-by, and everybody laughed at him.
When they let him go at last, he went and sat on some stone stairs and cried. The big fellow sobbed like a little child; one might almost have felt sorry for him.
WHAT THE TREE-SWALLOW SANG IN THE BUCKTHORN TREE
If you are standing at the harbour where all the steamers call, and look out towards the sea, you will see a mountain on your left, covered with green trees, and behind the trees a large house built in the shape of a spider. For in the centre there is a round building from which radiate eight wings, that look very much like the eight legs on the round body of a spider. The people who enter the house do not leave it again at will, and some of them stay there for the rest of their life, for the house is a prison.
In the days of King Oscar I, the mountain was not green. On the contrary, it was grey and cold, for neither moss nor heart’s-ease would grow there, although these plants generally thrive on the bare rock. There was nothing but grey stone and grey people, who looked as if they had been turned into stone, and who quarried stone, broke stone, and carried stone. And among these people there was one who looked stonier than all the others.
He was still a youth when, in the reign of King Oscar I., he was shut up in this prison because he had killed a man.
He was a prisoner for life, and sewn on his grey prison garb was a large black “L.”
He was always on the mountain, in winter days and summer time, breaking stones. In the winter he had only the empty and deserted harbour to look at; the semicircular bridge with its poles had the appearance of a yawning row of teeth, and he could see the wood-shed, the riding-school, and the two gigantic, denuded lime trees. Sometimes an ice-yacht would sail past the islet; sometimes a few boys would pass on skates; otherwise it was quiet and forsaken.
In the summer time it was much jollier. For then the harbour was full of smart boats, newly painted and decorated with flags. And the lime trees, in the shade of which he had sat when he was a child, waiting for his father, who was an engineer on one of the finest boats, were green.