This book is a classic collection of short stories from a poet Jens Peter Jacobsen associated with the so-called "modern breakthrough" in Danish literature in the 1870s. Jacobsen's immediate importance was his status as the writer of his generation. He stood aside from the conflict, content to be merely artist, a creator of beauty and a seeker after truth, eager to bring into the realm of literature "the eternal laws of nature, its glories, its riddles, its miracles," as he once put it. That is why his work has retained its living colors until to-day, without the least trace of fading.