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With his death my opportunities of frequently meeting Orla Lehmann ceased. But that the latter had not quite lost sight of me, he proved by appearing, at the end of February, 1870, at my examination upon my doctor's thesis at the University.
This was the man most beloved of the previous generation, whose star had certainly declined since the war, but whose name was still one to conjure with, Orla Lehmann. I had made his acquaintance when I was little more than a boy, in a very curious way.
It did not even occur to me to work up and improve my lecture on Runeberg, for the very thought of appearing before a large audience alarmed me and was utterly intolerable to me. During the whole of my first stay in Paris I was so tormented by the consent that Orla Lehmann had extorted from me, that it was a shadow over my pleasure.
There was one, however, who, under such circumstances, found it simply impossible to go. I stayed, even if I had just been thinking of taking my leave. Under the autocracy, Orla Lehmann had been the lyrical figure of Politics; he had voiced the popular hopes and the beauty of the people's will, much more than the political poets did. They wrote poetry; his nature was living poetry.
Orla Lehmann, a Minister at the time, came out of the Castle, made his way through the crowd, and shouted again and again, first to one side, then to the other: "He has signed! He has signed!" He did not say: "The King." The people now endured seven weeks of uninterrupted change and kaleidoscopic alteration of the political situation.
Passionately patriotic though Orla Lehmann was, he was very far from falling into the then usual error of overestimating Denmark's historical exploits and present importance.
It was only after my return home that I summoned up courage to write to him, pleading my youth and unfitness, and begging to be released from the honourable but distasteful duty. Orla Lehmann, in the meantime, had in all probability not bestowed a thought on the whole matter and long since forgotten all about it.
Of course, next day I sent in a landing boat, with two covering boats, and fetched him off with the loot." "How big was the pot?" Whiskers asked. "I heard of a pot at Orla worth eighty quid." "To commence with," Slim answered, "there were forty fat pigs, each worth a fathom of prime shell-money, and shell-money worth a quid a fathom. That was two hundred dollars right there.
In the year 1865 I had given a few lectures in C.N. David's house, on Runeberg, whom I had glorified exceedingly, and as the David and Lehmann houses, despite the political differences between them, were closely related one to the other, and intimately connected, Orla Lehmann had heard these lectures very warmly spoken of.
Orla Lehmann, his patron, was also one of Kristian Moeller's frequent visitors. But whenever he arrived, generally late and the last, the result was always the same.
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