Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863. Various

noiselessly, for the hearing of the prisoner is wonderfully sharpened by solitude. I removed the valve from the glass very softly, and looked into the closed room – for a moment the glance of the prisoner met my eye. It is airy, pure, and clean within, but the window is so high that it is impossible to look out. The whole furniture consists of a high bench, made fast to a kind of table, a berth, which can be fastened with hooks to the ceiling, and around which there is a curtain. Several cells were opened to us. In one there was a young, very pretty maiden; she had lain down in her berth, but sprang out when the door was opened, and her first movement disturbed the berth, which it unclasped and rolled together. Upon the little table stood the water cask, and near it lay the remains of hard black bread, farther off the Bible, and a few spiritual songs. In another cell sat an infanticide; I saw her only through the small glass of the door, she had heard our steps, and our talking, but she sat still, cowered together in the corner by the door, as if she wished to conceal herself as much as she could; her back was bent, her head sunk almost into her lap, and over it her hands were folded. The unhappy one is very young, said they. In two different cells sat two brothers; they were paying the penalty of horse-stealing; one was yet a boy. In one cell sat a poor servant girl; they said she had no relations, and was poor, and they placed her here. I thought that I had misunderstood, repeated my question, Why is the maiden here? and received the same answer. Yet still I prefer to believe that I have misunderstood the remark. Without, in the clear, free sunlight, is the busy rush of day; here within the stillness of midnight always reigns. The spider, which spins along the wall, the swallow, which rarely flies near the vaulted window there above, even the tread of the stranger in the gallery, close by the door, is an occurrence in this mute, solitary life, where the mind of the prisoner revolves ever upon himself. One should read of the martyr cells of the holy inquisition, of the unfortunates of the Bagnio chained to each other, of the hot leaden chambers, and the dark wet abyss of the pit of Venice, and shudder over those pictures, in order to wander through the galleries of the cell prison with a calmer heart; here is light, here is air, here it is more human. Here, where the sunbeam throws in upon the prisoner its mild light, here will an illuminating beam from God Himself sink into the heart.'

      Last we have

'SALA

      'Sweden's great king, Germany's deliverer, Gustavus Adolphus, caused Sala to be built. The small enclosed wood in the vicinity of the little town relates to us yet traditions of the youthful love of the hero king, of his rendezvous with Ebba Brahe. The silver shafts at Sala are the largest, the deepest and oldest in Sweden; they reach down a hundred and seventy fathoms, almost as deep as the Baltic. This is sufficient to awaken an interest in the little town; how does it look now? 'Sala,' says the guide book, 'lies in a valley, in a flat, and not very agreeable region.' And so it is truly; in that direction was nothing beautiful, and the highway led directly into the town, which has no character. It consists of a single long street with a knot and a pair of ends: the knot is the market; at the ends are two lanes which are attached to it. The long street – it may be called long in such a short town – was entirely empty. No one came out of the doors, no one looked out of the windows. It was with no small joy that I saw a man, at last, in a shop, in whose window hung a paper of pins, a red handkerchief, and two tea cans, a solitary, sedate apprentice, who leaned over the counter and looked out through the open house door. He certainly wrote that evening in his journal, if he kept one; 'To-day a traveller went through the town; the dear God may know him, I do not!' The apprentice's face appeared to me to say all that, and he had an honest face.

      'In the tavern in which I entered, the same deathlike stillness reigned as upon the street. The door was indeed closed, but in the interior of the house all the doors stood wide open; the house cock stood in the midst of the sitting room, and crowed in order to give information that there was some one in the house. As to the rest, the house was entirely picturesque; it had an open balcony looking out upon the court – upon the street would have been too lively. The old sign hung over the door and creaked in the wind; it sounded as if it were alive. I saw it from my window; I saw also how the grass had overgrown the pavement of the street. The sun shone clear, but as it shines in the sitting room of the solitary old bachelor and upon the balsam in the pot of the old maid, it was still as on a Scottish Sunday, and it was Tuesday! I felt myself drawn to study Young's 'Night Thoughts.'

      'I looked down from the balcony into the neighbor's court; no living being was to be seen, but children had played there; they had built a little garden out of perfectly dry twigs; these had been stuck into the soft earth and watered; the potsherd, which served as watering pot, lay there still; the twigs represented roses and geranium. It had been a splendid garden – ah yes! We great, grown-up men play just so, build us a garden with love's roses and friendship's geranium, we water it with our tears and our heart's blood – and yet they are and remain dry twigs without roots. That was a gloomy thought – I felt it, and in order to transform the dry twigs into a blossoming Aaron's-staff, I went out. I went out into the ends and into the long thread, that is to say, into the little lanes and into the great street, and here was more life, as I might have expected; a herd of cows met me, who were coming home, or going away, I know not – they had no leader. The apprentice was still standing behind the counter; he bowed over it and greeted; the stranger took off his hat in return; these were the events of this day in Sala. Pardon me, thou still town, which Gustavus Adolphus built, where his young heart glowed in its first love, and where the silver rests in the deep shafts without the town, in a flat and not very pleasant country. I knew no one in this town, no one conducted me about, and so I went with the cows, and reached the graveyard; the cows went on, I climbed over the fence, and found myself between the graves, where the green grass grew, and nearly all the tombstones lay with inscriptions blotted out; only here and there, 'Anno' was still legible – what further? And who rests here? Everything on the stone was effaced, as the earth life of the one who was now earth within the earth. What drama have ye dead ones played here in the still Sala? The setting sun threw its beams over the graves, no leaf stirred on the tree; all was still, deathly still, in the town of the silver mines, which for the remembrance of the traveller is only a frame about the apprentice, who bowed greeting over the counter.'

      Silence, stillness, quiet, solitude, loneliness, far-away-ness; hushed, calm, remote, out of the world, un-newspapered, operaless, un-gossipped – was there ever a sketch which carried one so far from the world as this of 'Sala'? That one shopboy – those going or coming cows – the tombs, with wornout dates, every point of time vanishing – a living grave!

      Contrast again, dear reader. Verily she is a goddess – and I adore her. Lo! she brings me back again in Sala to the busy streets of this city, and the office, and the 'exchanges,' and the rustling, bustling world, and the hotel dinner – to be in time for which I am even now writing against time – and I am thankful for it all. Sala has cured me. That picture drives away longings. Verily, he who lives in America, and in its great roaring current of events, needs but a glance at Sala to feel that here he is on a darting stream ever hurrying more gloriously into the world and away from the dull inanity – which the merest sibilant of aggravation will change to insanity.

      Reader, our Andersen is an artist – as most children know. But I am glad that he seldom gives us anything which is so very much of a monochrome as Sala.

      I wonder if Sala was the native and surnaming town of that other Sala whose initials are G. A. S., and whose nature is 'ditto'? Did its dulness drive him to liveliness, even as an 'orthodox' training is said to drive youth to dissipation? It may be so. The one hath a deep mine of silver – the other contains inexhaustible mines of brass – and the name of the one as of the other, when read in Hebrew-wise gives us 'alas!'

      But I am wandering from the Northern pictures and fresh nature, and must close.

      THE NEW RASSELAS

      … And Joseph, opening the drawing room, told me the postchaise was ready. My mother and my sister threw themselves into my arms.

      'It is still time,' said they, 'to abandon this scheme. Stay with us.'

      'Mother, I am of noble birth, I am now twenty, I must have a name, I must be talked about in the country, I must be getting a position in the army or at court.'

      'Oh! but, Bernard, when you have gone, what will become of me?'

      'You