Nissen’s School. Examen Artium

Beginning in the autumn of 1859, Sophus now lived in a bed-sitter in Christiania with his brother John Herman. The two parsons’ sons had found lodgings with a Miss Meyer, who seems to have lived somewhere in Pilestredet, one of the city’s safe and good neighbourhoods. She was probably a somewhat well-off lady; she was in any case a great lover of flowers and had so many that her houseplants even overflowed into the boys’ room, surely also in the windowsill, easily visible from the outside. In a letter home to his sister Laura in Moss, John Herman wrote that he and Sophus had nothing against all Miss Meyer’s plants, which in a way reminded them of their sister’s love of flowers. How were sister Laura’s twenty-four different sorts of acacia coming along anyway? The two boys had a standing rose, two ivy plants and a geranium in their room, and they wondered if such a love of flowers was something particularly common to womenfolk.