46. Whatever opinion one has of that picture, it's anyhow a little piece of traditional rural Sweden, I thought. I shouted Hello! yet another time and went straight on, opened the door to the spacious kitchen. And there she was, sitting by a table looking out through a window, obviously dreaming of something that I didn't have the foggiest. Suddenly she woke up and said: "Oh, you scared me! Can't you say Hello at least! " So I said: "Hello." For a fourth time.

45. There was a narrow path beside the boat houses, through the pine forest and up the hill. There it was, the whiteish mansion that I saw from the seaside. The door was open and I came into an entrance hall. I shouted Hello! a couple of times but nobody answered. Nobody at home, I guessed. There were lots of pictures on the walls, one of them was a colourful photo of a fishermen's village nearby, red wooden houses, built in the traditional Swedish way.

44. "Next to the boatyard" there were some colourful small wooden houses clinging together by a bridge. Obviously they were built in whatever material and whichever paint that was at hand for the moment. That's where the boatowners used to keep there boating gear when they weren't sailing.

43. Up early in the morning, long before anybody else, brought my watercolours, went out to the bridge. A thin layer of light in the atmosphere, complete silence, the birds still asleep, not even a fading wave on the water, just like a mirror. Fixed an image on the paper in a minute. That was it. Suddenly a soft wind came sweeping from the sea, dived into the bay, passed the bridge were I was sitting, the little boat yard and the whiteish mansion nearby, raised along the steep cliffs and shook for a second the red pinetops overlooking the islands, scattered all over this part of the Baltic. And with the wind came the waves and the mirror was gone. I jumped into the clear water, swam a little, went up again, lit my pipe and thought: "A new day".

42. "Happy Days!" she said, saluting with a glass of pink champagne. "Happy days!" I returned. This newyears eve had been something very special, something of the kind one couldn't forget that easily. Cheers, I said, just to make sure she followed me in this complicated conversation. For some ungodly known reason my thoughts went to days, after which many a newyears eve had passed. It was a summer morning somewhere by the Swedish east coast.