which made him appear twice as tall.  His large brown overcoat, to which long use had given a greenish tint, hung loosely around him; he wore short breeches and shoes with buckles, and from beneath his black silk cap a few gray locks had made their escape.  His rosy cheeks and smiling countenance gave an expression of great sweetness to his face.  He also wore spectacles, through which he did not cast piercing glances like the doctor, but through them his blue eyes shone with inexhaustible benevolence.

In the memory of his pupils Mr. Malarius had never punished a scholar.  But, nevertheless, they all respected him, and loved him.  He had a brave soul, and all the world knew it very well.  They were not ignorant of the fact that in his youth he had passed brilliant examinations, and that he had been offered a professorship in a great university, where he might have attained to honor and wealth.  But he had a sister, poor Kristina, who was always ill and suffering.  She would not have left her native village for the world, for she felt sure that she would die if they removed to the city.  So Mr. Malarius had submitted gently to her wishes, and sacrificed his own prospects.  He had accepted the humble duty of the village school-master, and when twenty years afterward Kristina had died, blessing him, he had become accustomed to his obscure and retired life, and did not care to change it.  He was absorbed in his work, and forgot the world.  He found a supreme pleasure in becoming a model instructor, and in having the best-conducted school in his country.  Above all, he liked to instruct his best pupils in the higher branches, to initiate them into scientific studies, and in ancient and modern literature, and give them the information which is usually the portion of the higher classes, and not bestowed upon the children of fishermen and peasants.

“What is good for one class, is good for the other,” he argued.  “If the poor have not as many comforts, that is no reason why they should be denied an acquaintance with Homer and Shakespeare; the names of the stars which guide them across the ocean, or of the plants which grow on the earth.  They will soon see them laid low by their ploughs, but in their infancy at least they will have drunk from pure sources, and participated in the common patrimony of mankind.”  In more than one country this system would have been thought imprudent, and calculated to disgust the lowly with their humble lot in life, and lead them to wander away in search of adventures.  But in Norway nobody thinks of these things.  The patriarchal sweetness of their dispositions, the distance between the villages, and the laborious habits of the people, seem to remove all danger of this kind.  This higher instruction is more frequent than a stranger would believe to be possible.  Nowhere is education more generally diffused, and nowhere is it carried so high; as well in the poorest rural schools, as in the colleges.