These were the ones Hjalmar had
written. But they lay down as if they had tumbled pell-mell over
the pencil lines upon which they were to stand.
"'Look, this is the way you should hold yourselves,' said the copy,
'sloping this way with a bold swing.' 'Oh, we should be very glad
to do that,' answered Hjalmar's letters, 'but we can't. We are so
weakly.' 'Then you must take medicine,' said the Sandman. 'Oh, no,
no,' cried they, and straightway they stood up so gracefully that
it was a pleasure to look at them."
This strikes me as having the very movement and all the delicious
whimsicality of a school-boy's troubled dream. It has the delectable
absurdity of the dream's inverted logic. You feel with what beautiful
zest it was written; how childishly the author himself relished it. The
illusion is therefore perfect. The big child who played with his puppet
theatre until after he was grown up is quite visible in every line. He
is as much absorbed in the story as any of his hearers.
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