"Nay; I cannot recover from my surprise!" said the learned man.
"Be quite at thy ease about that," said the learned man; "I shall not say to anyone who thou actually art: here is my hand--I promise it, and a man's bond is his word."
"Now I shall tell you my adventures," said the shadow; and then he sat, with the polished boots, as heavily as he could, on the arm of the learned man's new shadow, which lay like a poodle-dog at his feet.
"And what didst thou then see?" asked the learned man.
"I beg your pardon," said the learned man; "it is an old habit with me.
"How did it look in the furthest saloon?" asked the learned man.
And besides, I learned to know my inward nature, my innate qualities, the relationship I had with Poesy.
The learned man was not at all in the most enviable state; grief and torment followed him, and what he said about the true, and the good, and the beautiful, was, to most persons, like roses for a cow!
"You really look like a shadow!" said his friends to him; and the learned man trembled, for he thought of it.
Now the learned man didn't think much about that; he was a very kind-hearted man, and particularly mild and friendly, and so he said one day to the shadow: "As we have now become companions, and in this way have grown up together from childhood, shall we not drink 'thou' together, it is more familiar?"
You, as a learned man, certainly know how strange nature is.