He responded in his own name in the next number (Thursday's). He said that if this misunderstanding were intentional, it was paltry; if unintentional, explanation ought at least to have been sought privately. Nothing had been said that in the least resembled this; all that was said was that the transition from childhood to maturity was so difficult a time for most that it became dangerous, and it therefore needed watchfulness.
What the principal of the school had noticed was that the characters of children of that age altered, that they lost their industry, their sense of order; "that this was the rule, the contrary the exception." Could any one discover in this any such frightful suggestions as had been made?
The answer was good, but it did not avail, the excitement was so great that no words could set things straight. "Why was this transition dangerous?" they wished to know, if not for the reason he now tried to evade?
Just below Rendalen's answer appeared in the same number another question, signed "A Mother:" "Why was it of such great importance that little children should learn how the race is propagated?" This inquiry gave expression to a second side of the scandal, which filled the town. Under this question was still another address to Herr Real-Kandidat, School Director Rendalen; it begged "most respectfully" to ask, if he would not allow the lecture, which he had delivered last Saturday at the new gymnasium of the girls' school to be printed. Those who had heard it might thus enjoy it again, and those who had not been so fortunate ought not to lose the opportunity of obtaining some information on so remarkable a subject: signed "A friend of sound and safe enlightenment."
In the next number (Saturday's) an answer from Rendalen: "Children already learned natural history, and therefore of course the terms for propagation of the species. Why they must learn this, any head-master or principal of a school could answer as well as he; this formed no part of the new side of his proposal, and only so far affected small schools as regarded the scope and method of teaching the subject." To the other question he replied, that a lecture to which only parents had had admission was evidently not fitted for general circulation.
Few found this answer satisfactory; he simply evaded the question; at least three hundred people had heard the lecture, so that it might quite properly be discussed in the press.
Three more contributions in the same number. The first expressed pleasure in the promptness of the reply; would Herr Rendalen now further explain how the sinful inclinations of young people could be checked by microscopes? This witticism was at once recognised as Dösen's. The second was signed "Arithmeticus" and reckoned up what it would cost the country if, in the future, every school were to have a doctor as a teacher; he calculated that a sum of one million kroner a year would be necessary for this item alone; if every school were to have a chaplain as well, this would require an equal sum; a rough estimate of the cost of the apparatus, necessitated by Rendalen's plan, would, reckoned as income, be hardly less than one hundred thousand kroner a year. Therefore the school budget of the country would be burdened with an addition of about two million one hundred thousand kroner a year. He asked if this were reasonable?
After this came a communication addressed to Herr Tomas Kurt, otherwise Rendalen. A child of the town, it said, had fouled its own nest. If this town were worse than others, which the writer begged leave to doubt, then the ancestors of the lecturer were certainly most to blame for it, and that both in ancient and modern times, he was certainly therefore the last who ought to talk? This contributor signed himself "Suum cuique."
On the same day that these appeared Rendalen gave his second lecture, and at this, which was announced as being exclusively a technical one, twenty people, including the teachers, were present; beside these, ten came in during the course of the lecture.
One could see that those eight days had pressed hardly upon Thomas, Fru Rendalen, and Karl. Tomas's opening to-day was another man's--tame, flat, hesitating; his nervousness had increased twenty per cent., his handkerchief was out of his pocket and in again, the water-bottle was emptied, his hair pushed up; he fidgeted with his hands, and his feet moved about as though he were blowing the bellows of an organ. But when he began to speak of the school plan, exhibiting and explaining appliances and apparatus, he caught fire and was soon his old self again, his superior power of making things plain and of awakening interest in them was recovered. A microscope with a leaf under it was passed round while he spoke; he showed them a succession of new things, either entire collections, or large coloured pictures, or highly finished models which could be taken to pieces and studied in the most minute details; for example, a man's chest, stomach, neck, head, some of the finer parts being on an enlarged scale. Such a collection of apparatus, he said, could never have been made in their own country. "We are indebted to the interest of the world at large that we, remote and small as we are, are able to see such a one; and, moreover, that I should have been able to procure it." Some of it, however, he said, had been given to him.