ON THE SEABOARD

A NOVEL OF THE BALTIC ISLANDS

FROM THE SWEDISH OF

AUGUST STRINDBERG

AUTHOR OF

EASTER, LUCKY PEHR, ETC.

TRANSLATED BY

ELIZABETH CLARKE WESTERGREN

AUTHORIZED EDITION

NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

1913

[Contents]

[PREFACE]

August Strindberg's first literary productions were warmly received, and would have aroused lasting enthusiasm and admiration had the young author's prolific pen been less aggressive, in this, for his country, a totally new style of novel. His intrepid sarcasm which emanated from a physical disability, known only to a few of his most intimate friends, called forth severe criticism from the old aristocrats and the conservative element, which drove the gifted dramatist from his own country to new spheres. Life's vicissitudes at Vierwaldstätter See, and Berlin, also later on at Paris from whence his fame spread rapidly over Europe, changed his realism to pessimism.

After years of ceaseless work, during which he dipped into almost every branch of science, he suddenly determined to transfer his activities to this side of the Atlantic, where he was desirous of becoming known. For this purpose his most singular novel was chosen for translation; meantime some invisible power drew him back to his birthplace, Stockholm, and a new generation cheered his coming.

Later on critics called him "A demolisher and a reformer that came like a cyclone, with his daring thought and daring words, which broke in upon the everlasting tenets and raised Swedish culture."

His delineations are photographical exactness without retouch, bearing always a strong reflection of his personality.

MAGNUS WESTERGREN.

Boston, Mass.
April, 1913.

[CHAPTER FIRST]

A fishing boat lay one May evening to beam-wind, out on Goosestone bay. "Rokarna," known to all on the coast by their three pyramids, were changing to blue, while upon the clear sky clouds were forming just as the sun began to sink. Already there was dashing outside the points, and a disagreeable flapping in the mainsail signified that the land-breeze would soon break against newborn currents of air, from above, from the sea and from aft.

At the tiller sat the Custom House Surveyor of the East Skerries, a giant with black long full beard. Occasionally he exchanged a look with two subordinates who were sitting in the bow, one of whom was tending the clutch-pole, keeping the big square sail to the wind.

Sometimes the steersman cast a searching look at the little gentleman who was crouching at the mast seemingly afraid and frozen, now and then drawing his shawl closer round his body.

The surveyor must have found him ridiculous, for frequently he turned leeward with a pretense of spitting tobacco juice to conceal a rising laugh.

The little gentleman was dressed in a beaver-colored spring coat under which a pair of wide moss-green pants peeped out, flaring at the bottom round a pair of crocodile shagreen shoes topped with brown cloth and black buttons. Nothing of his under dress was visible, but round his neck was twisted a cream-colored foulard, while his hands were well protected in a pair of salmon-colored three-button glacé-gloves, and the right wrist was encircled by a gold bracelet carved in the form of a serpent biting its tail. Ridges upon the gloves showed that rings were worn beneath. The face, as much as could be seen, was thin and haggard; a small black mustache with ends curled upwards increased the paleness and gave it a foreign expression. The hat was turned back, exposing a black closely cut bang resembling a calotte.

What seemed most to attract the indefatigable attention of the steersman was the bracelet, mustache and bang.

During the long voyage from Dalaro this man, who was a great humorist, had tried to get up a cheery conversation with the Fish Commissioner, whom he had in charge to take to the station at the East Skerries, but the young doctor had shown an injured unsusceptibility to his witty importunities which convinced the surveyor that the "instructor" was insolent.

Meanwhile the wind freshened as they passed Hanstone to windward and the dangerous sail began to flutter. The fish commissioner, who had been sitting with a navy chart in his hand, noting the answers to his questions, placed it in his pocket and turned toward the man at the tiller saying in a voice more like a woman's than a man's:

"Please sail more carefully!"

"Is the instructor afraid?" asked the helmsman scornfully.

"Yes, I am careful of my life and keep close hold of it," answered the commissioner.

"But not of other's lives?" asked the helmsman.

"At least not so much as my own," returned the commissioner, "and sailing is a dangerous occupation, especially with a square sail."

"So, sir, you have often sailed before with a square sail?"

"Never in my life, but I can see where the wind directs its power and can reckon how much resistance the weight of the boat can make and well judge when the sail will jibe."

"Well, take the tiller yourself then!" snubbingly remarked the surveyor.

"No! that is your place! I do not ride on the coachman's box when I travel on the Crown's errands."

"Oh, you cannot manage a boat, of course."

"If I could not, it is certainly easy to learn, since every other schoolboy can do it and every custom house subordinate, therefore I need not be ashamed that I cannot, only sail carefully now as I would not willingly have my gloves spoiled and get wet."

It was an order, and the surveyor, who was cock of the walk at the East Skerries, felt himself degraded. After a movement on the tiller the sail filled and the boat sped onward steadily towards the rock, with its white custom house cottage brightly shining in the rays of the setting sun.

The seaboard was vanishing, there was a feeling that all kindly protection was left behind, when venturing out on the open boundless water, with darkness threatening toward the east. There was no prospect of crawling to leeward of islands or rocks, no possibility in case of storm to lay up to and reef, out right into the middle of destruction, over the black gulf, out to that little rock that looks no larger than a buoy cast into the middle of the sea. The fish commissioner, as signified before, held fast to his only life and was intelligent enough to count his insignificant resistance against nature's superiority. Now he felt depressed. He was too clear-sighted with his thirty-six years to overestimate the insight and daring of the man at the tiller. He did not look with reliance at his brown and whiskered visage, nor would he believe that a muscular arm was equal to a wind which blew with thousands of pounds pressure against a rocking sail. He viewed such courage as founded upon faulty judgment. What stupidity, thought he, to risk one's life in a little open boat when there exist deckers and steamers. What incredible folly to hoist such a big sail on a spruce mast, which bends like a bow when a strong wind strikes it. The lee-shroud was hanging slack, likewise the forestay, and the whole wind pressure was lying on the windward-shroud, which seemed rotten. Trust to such an uncertain residue as a few flax ropes more or less cohesive, he would not, and therefore he turned with the next gust of wind to the subordinate who was sitting close to the halyard, and in a short penetrating voice commanded, "Let the sail run!"

The two Inferiors looked toward the stern, awaiting the helmsman's orders, but the fish commissioner repeated his command instantly and with such emphasis that the sail sank.

The surveyor in the stern shrieked.

"Who the Devil commands the maneuvering of my boat?"

"I," answered the commissioner.

Whereupon he turned to the subordinates with the order.

"Put out the oars!"

The oars were put out and the boat gave a few rolls, for the surveyor had left the tiller angrily at the command, exclaiming,

"Yes, then he can take the helm himself!"

The commissioner at once took his place in the stern and the tiller was under his arm before the surveyor had ceased swearing.

The glacé-glove cracked instantly at the thumb, but the boat made even speed while the surveyor sat with laughter in his whiskers, and one oar ready to push out to give course to the boat. The commissioner had no attention to bestow upon the doubting seaman, but stared attentively windward and could soon discern a heaving sea with its swell many meters long, from the surge with its short water fall, then after a hasty glance astern he measured the leeway, and in the wake noted the setting of the currents, it was perfectly clear what course must be held not to drift past the East Skerries.

The surveyor, who had searched long to meet the black burning glances that they might mark his laughter, became tired, for it looked as though they would have no contact with anything that could soil or disturb them. After a moment's beseeching the surveyor becoming absent and dejected began to observe the maneuvering.

The sun had reached the horizon, the waves were breaking purple black at the base, deep green at the side, and where the crests rose highest they lighted up grass green. The foam sprouted and hissed red champagne colored in the sun. The boat and men were now low down in the dusk, or the next moment, on the crest of a wave, the four faces glowed and instantly faded away.

Not every wave broke so high, some were only rocking slowly and cradling the boat, lifting and sucking it forward. It seemed as though the little man at the tiller could from a distance judge when a gigantic wave would come, and with a slight push at the tiller held firm or sneaked between the dreadful green walls, which threatened to spring and form an arch over the boat.

The fact was that the danger had really increased through the sail being furled, for the driving power had diminished and the sail's lifting ability must be dispensed with, therefore the surveyor's astonishment at the incredible fine maneuvering began to change to admiration.

He looked at the changing expression on the pale face and the movement in the black eyes, and felt that inside there was a combined calculation. Then not to seem superfluous himself he put out his oar, for he felt the time had come, and acknowledged willingly the superiority before it was wrung from him, thus:

"Oh, he has been at sea before!"

The fish commissioner, who was deeply occupied, and would have no intercourse whatever, as he was afraid of being surprised and deceived in a moment's weakness by the apparent external superiority of the giant, made no response.

His right glove had cracked round the thumb, and the bracelet had fallen over the hand. When the flame faded from the crest of the waves and the day closed, he took out with his left hand a lorgnette and placed it in his right eye, moving his head quickly to several points of the compass as though he would sight land, where no land was to be seen, and then threw this brief question forward.

"Have you no lighthouse on the East Skerries?"

"God knows we have not," answered the surveyor.

"Have we any shoals?"

"Deep water."

"Shall we sight Landsort or Sandham's lighthouse?"

"Not much of Sandham but more to Landsort," replied the surveyor.

"Sit still at your places and we shall come out all right," finished the commissioner, who seemed to have taken a bearing by the heads of the three men and some unknown firm point in the distance.

The clouds had flocked together and the May dusk had given place to obscurity. It was like a swing forwards into some thin impenetrable material, without light. The sea was rising only as darker shadows against the shadowy sky, the heads of the waves struck the bottom of the boat and lifting it up on their backs dived down on the other side and rolled out. But now to separate friend from foe was difficult and the calculation more uncertain. Two oars were out to leeward and one to windward, which if applied with more or less power at the right moment would keep the boat buoyant.

The commissioner, who soon could not see more than the two lighthouses in north and south, must now compensate the loss of sight by the ear and before he could become used to the sea's roaring, sighing, hissing and spouting, or distinguish between a dashing or a surging wave, the water had already come into the boat, so that to save his fine shoes he placed his feet on a thwart.

Soon he had studied the harmony of the waves, and could even hear from the regular beating of the swell the danger approaching, and feel on the right ear-drum when the wind pressed the harder and threatened to toss the water higher. It was as though he had improvised nautical and meteorological instruments out of his susceptible senses from which the conductors connected with his big brain battery, hidden by that little ridiculous hat and the black bang.

The men who at the moment of the water's intrusion muttered rebellious words, became silenced when they felt how the boat shot forward, and at each word of command, windward, or leeward, they knew which way to pull.

The commissioner had taken his bearings on the two lighthouses and used the lorgnette quadrangle glass as a distance measure, but the difficulty of holding the course was that no light could be seen from the windows of the cottages since they were in the lee of the hillock. When the dangerous voyage had been continued an hour or more, a dark rise was observed forward against the horizon. The helmsman, who would not, to gain doubtful advice, disturb his own intuitions on which he relied most, bore down on what he supposed to be the East Skerries or some of their points, consoling himself that arriving at a firm object, whatever it might be, was always better than hovering between air and water. The dark wall approached with a speed greater than that of the boat so that suspicion dawned in the commissioner's mind that everything was not right in their course. In order to ascertain what it could be and at the same time give a signal in case the obscure object should be a vessel which had neglected to put its lights out, he took up his box of storm matches and lighting them all, held them up in the air a moment, then threw them up so that they illuminated a few meters around the boat. The light penetrated the darkness for only, a second, but the picture which appeared like a magic-lantern view was fixed before his eyes for several seconds, and he saw drifting ice heaved upon a rock, against which a wave broke like a cave over a gigantic rock of limespar, and a flock of long-tailed ducks and sea-gulls that arose with numerous shrieks and were drowned in the darkness. The sight of the breaking wave affected the commissioner as it does the condemned to look upon the coffin in which his decapitated body shall rest, and he felt in a moment of imagination the double pang of cold and smothering, but the agony which paralyzed his muscles awoke on the other hand all the concealed powers of the soul, so that he, in a fraction of a second, could make a sure estimate of how great the danger was, and count out the only way of escape, whereupon he cried out, "Hold all!"

The men who had been sitting with their backs toward the wave and had not observed it, rested on their oars, and the boat was sucked into the wave which might have been three or four meters high. It broke over the boat, forming a green cupola and fell on the other side with all its mass of water. The boat was disgorged half filled with water and the occupants half smothered from the dreadful compression of air. Three outcries as from sleepers who have the nightmare were heard at a time, but the fourth, the man at the tiller, was silent. He made only a gesture with his hand toward the rock where now a light was shimmering, only a few cable lengths to leeward, and then sank in the stern sheets and lay there.

The boat ceased pitching for it had come into smooth water, the oarsmen were all sitting as if intoxicated, dipping the oars, which were now unnecessary for the boat was slowly wafted into harbor by the fair wind.

"What have you in the boat, good folks?" greeted an old fisherman after he had said "Good evening," which the wind swept away.

"It should be a fish instructor!" whispered the surveyor as he pulled the boat upon the beach.

"So it is such a one who comes to spy out the nets! Well, he shall be treated as he seeks to be," said fisherman Oman, who seemed to be head man for the few poor population of the island.

The custom house surveyor waited for the instructor to go on shore, but he saw no sign of movement in that little bundle which lay in the stern so he climbed uneasily into the boat and clasped both arms round the prostrate body and carried it to the beach.

"Is he gone?" asked Oman, not without a certain tremor of hope.

"There isn't much of him left," answered the surveyor as he carried his wet load up to the cottage.

The sight reminded of a giant and a lilliputian when the imposing surveyor entered his brother's kitchen where his sister-in-law stood at the fire, and as he laid down the little body on the sofa an expression of compassion for the weaker man gleamed from the low-browed, dark-whiskered visage.

"Here we have the fish inspector, Mary," he greeted his sister-in-law, placing his arm round her waist. "Help us now to get something dry upon him and something wet into him and then let him go to his room."

The commissioner made a wretched and ridiculous figure as he lay on the hard wooden sofa. The white standing collar twisted around his neck like a dirty rag, all of the fingers of the right hand peeped out of the cracked glove over which the softened cuffs hung sticking with the dissolved starch. The small crocodile shoes had lost all shine and shape, and it was with the greatest effort that the surveyor and his sister-in-law could pull them off the feet.

When he was finally deprived of most of his clothing and covered with quilts, they carried him boiled milk and schnapps, each shaking an arm, after which the surveyor raised the little body and slowly poured the milk into it. Beneath the closed eyes the mouth gaped, but when the sister-in-law would give him a dram, the smell seemed to act like a quick poison; with a gesture of the hand he pushed the glass back, and opening his eyes wide awake as though just finishing a refreshing sleep, he asked for his room.

Of course it was not in order but it would be in about an hour if he would only lie still and wait.

The commissioner was lying there spending an intolerable hour with his eyes flitting over the tiresome arrangements of the chamber and its occupants. It was the government's cottage for the surveyor of that little department of the custom house on the East Skerries. Everything was scanty, merely a roof over the head. The white, bare walls were as narrow as the Crown's ideas, four white rectangles which enclosed a room covered by a white rectangle. Strange, hard as a hotel room, which is not to dwell in, only for lodging. To put on wall papers for his successor or for the Crown, neither the surveyor nor his predecessors had the heart. In the midst of this dead whiteness stood dark, poor, factory-made furniture, with half modern shapes. A round dining table of knotted pine stained with walnut and marked with white rings from dishes, chairs of the same material with high backs, and tilting on three legs, a bed-sofa, manufactured like ready-made men's clothing, from the cheapest and least possible material. Nothing seemed to fulfill its purpose of inviting rest and comfort, everything was useless, and therefore unsightly, notwithstanding its ornaments of papier maché.

The surveyor placed his broad buttock on a rattan chair and rested his mighty back against it, the maneuver was followed by annoying creaks and a morose exhortation from the sister-in-law, to be careful of other folk's things, whereupon the surveyor answered with an impudent patting followed by a look which left no doubt as to the relations existing between them.

The oppression which the whole room had caused in the commissioner was increased by the discovery of this discord. As naturalist he had not the current ideas about what was permissible and what was not permissible, but he had strongly impressed instinct of the designs in certain arrangements of nature's laws and suffered internally when he saw nature's commands violated. This was to him as though he should have found in his laboratory an acid which since the world's creation had only united with one base but was now, against its nature, forming a union with two.

His imagination was stirred in remonstrance over evolution from common sensuality to monogamy, and he felt himself back in the dark ages among wild herds of human beings, who lived a coral life and existed in masses, before selection and variation were attained to ordain individual personal being and consanguinity.

When he saw a two-years-old girl with too big a head and fish eyes walking around the chamber with timid footsteps, as though afraid to be seen, he comprehended at once that a doubtful birth had sown its seeds of discord which were working dissolution and disturbance, and he could easily understand that the moment must come when this living testimony would pay all the penalties of being an involuntary witness.

In the midst of these thoughts the door opened and the husband entered.

It was the surveyor's brother who had thus far remained a subordinate. He was physically even better endowed than the surveyor, but he was a blond with an open and friendly look.

After a cheerful "Good evening," he sat down at the table beside his brother and, taking the child on his lap, kissed it.

"We have a visitor," said the surveyor, pointing to the sofa where the commissioner lay. "It is the fish instructor, who will live upstairs."

"So, it is he?" said Vestman, as he rose to greet him.

With the child on his arm he approached the sofa, because he was host of the cottage, while his brother was unmarried and only boarded with him. Therefore he found it his place to welcome the guest.

"We have it simply out here," added he after a few words of welcome, "but my wife isn't entirely at a loss in preparing food, since she has served in better houses before, and married me three years ago, yet since we got this brat here she has a little more to think of. Yes, anybody can get children if they help each other,—as a matter of course I am not in need of help, as they say."

The commissioner was surprised at the sudden turn the long sentence had taken, and asked himself if the man was cognizant of anything, or if he had only a feeling that there was something out of order. He himself had seen in ten minutes the way things stood.

How then was it possible that he who was interested in the question had seen nothing in a couple of years?

He was overcome with loathing at the whole thing, and turned to the wall to blind his eyes, and with mental pictures of a pleasant nature let the remaining half hour pass.

He could not make himself deaf, and heard against his will the talk, which a short time before had been lively, becoming broken as though the words were measured with a rule before spoken, and when there was a silence the husband filled it out as though from aversion, and fearing to hear something he would not hear, and could not be calm before his own stream of words intoxicated him.

When the hour was finally to an end and no order concerning the room had been given, the commissioner rising asked if it was ready.

O yes, it was ready in a way, but—

Here the commissioner asked in a tone of command to be shown to his room at once, reminding them in fitting words that he had not come to share a room with them, or for hospitality, he was traveling on the Crown's errands and only asked for his rights—and those he would have because of a memorial from the Civil Department through the Internal Revenue Office, which had been sent to the Royal Custom House in Dalaro.

This straightened affairs at once, and Vestman, with a candle in his fist, followed the severe gentleman upstairs to the gable chamber, where nothing in the arrangements could explain the requested hour's delay.

It was an ordinary, large room with walls as white as those downstairs, the big window opened on the longest wall as a black hole through which streamed the darkness unimpeded by any curtains.

A bed stood there ready for use, simple, only an elevation of the floor to prevent drafts, a table, two chairs and a washstand comprised the furniture. The commissioner threw a look of despair about him, when he, who was used to feast his eyes to satisfaction on luxuries, saw only these scattered articles placed about in space, where the candle battled with the darkness and where the big window seemed to consume every beam of light which was produced by the burning tallow.

He felt lost, as though after battling upwards for half his maturity to attain refinement, good position and luxuries, he had fallen to poverty, moved down to a lower class. It was as though his love of beauty and wisdom were imprisoned, deprived of their nourishment and subject to banishment. Those naked walls were a middle age cloister cell where asceticism in image, and emptiness in the middle hurried the famined fantasy to gnaw itself and bring forth lighter or darker fancies only to become extricated from nothing. The white, the shapeless, the colorless nothing in the whitewashed walls raised an activity of the imagination such as a savage's cave or a green bough hut never could have evoked, or the forest with its ever changing colors and moving outlines would have dispensed. An activity that not the field, nor the heath with the clouds' and sky's rich coloring, nor yet the never tiring sea, could call forth.

He felt at once a rising desire instantly to paint the walls full of sunny landscapes with palms and parrots, to stretch a Persian rug over the ceiling and throw hides of deer upon the plank floor covering the ruled-ledger appearance, to place sofas in the corners with small tables in front, to suspend a hanging lamp over a round table strewn with books and magazines, stand a piano against the short wall and dress the long wall with book shelves, and away in the corner of the sofa set a little woman's figure, no matter which one!—Just as the candle on the table fought against the darkness, so his fantasy rebelled against the room's arrangements, and thus it lost its hold, everything disappeared, and the dreadful surroundings frightened him to bed. Quenching the light he drew the blankets over his head.

The wind shook the whole gable, and the water caraff rattled against the drinking glasses. The draft passed through the room from window to door and sometimes touched his locks of hair, which were dried from the sea wind, so that he fancied someone stroked them with his hand, while between the gusts of wind, like the striking of the kettledrum in an orchestra, beat and boomed the big breakers against the caverned rocks out on the south point. And when he had finally become used to the monotonous sound of wind and wave, he heard, shortly before he fell asleep, a man's voice in the room below teaching a child its evening prayer.

[CHAPTER SECOND]

When the commissioner, after a dead sleep induced by the efforts of the preceding day and the strong sea air, awoke the next morning and looked out of the blankets, he observed first an incomprehensible silence, and found that his ear caught slight sounds that otherwise he would have paid no attention to. He could hear each little movement of the sheet as it rose and fell from his respiration, the friction of his locks of hair against the pillow-case, the pulsations in the neck arteries, the rickety bed repeating the heart beat on a small scale. He felt the silence because the wind had gone down, and only the swell beat against the compressed air in the hollows of the strand and returned once every half minute. From the bed which was placed opposite the window he saw, through the lower pane, something like a blue draw-curtain, bluer than the air, and it kept moving toward him slowly, as though it would come in through the window and overflow the room. He knew it was the sea, but it looked so small,—and it rose like a perpendicular wall instead of expanding as a horizontal surface, because the long breakers were fully lighted by the sun and cast no shadows from which the eye could form a perspective image.

He arose, and partly dressing himself opened the window. The raw, moist air in the chamber rushed out, and from the sea came a warm green-house air, warmed several hours by the radiant May sun. Below the window he saw only low, jagged rocks in the crevices of which lay small dusty drifts of snow, and near by bloomed small white rye-flowers, well protected in beds of moss, and the poor wild pansies, pale yellow as from famine, and blue as from chill, hoisting their poor country's poor colors to the first spring sun. Lower down crept the heath and the crowberry vine, looking down over the precipice, below which lay a windrow of white sand, pulverized by the sea, and in which were stuck scattered sand-oat stalks; then came the kelp belt as a dark sash or braid on the white sand, highest up it was almost ivory black from last year's kelp in which were sticking shells, leaves of fir, twigs, fish bones, and toward the sea it was olive-brown from the last fresh kelp, which with its curled and knotted fronds formed a garniture like a chenille cord. Inside on the sandy side walk lay the top of a barkless pine, sand scrubbed, washed by the water, polished by the wind, bleached by the sun, resembling the ribs of a mammoth skeleton, and around it a whole osteologist's museum of like skeletons or fragments of the same.

A beacon, which had shown ships the way for years, lay thrown up, and with its thick end looked like the thigh bone and condyle of a giraffe; in another place a juniper shrub, like the carcass of a drowned cat, with its white small roots stretching out for the tail.

Outside the strand lay reefs and rocks which one moment glanced wet in the sunshine, the next were submerged by the swell which passed over them with a splash, or if it had not sufficient power, rose, burst, and threw a water-fall of foam into the air.

Outside the island lay the shining sea, that great flat, as the fishermen called it, and now in the morning hour it stretched like a blue canvas without a wrinkle but undulating like a flag. The big round surface would have been tiresome had not a red buoy been anchored outside the reef, and brightened up the monotony of the surface with its minium spot like the seal on a letter.

This was the sea, certainly nothing new to Commissioner Borg who had seen several corners of the world. Still it was the desolate sea seen as it were in a tête-à-tête. It did not terrify like the forest with its gloomy hiding places, it was quieting like an open, big, faithful blue eye. Everything could be seen at once, no ambush, no lurking place. It flattered the spectator when he saw this circle round him, where he himself ever remained the center. The big water surface was as a corporeity radiating from the beholder existing only in and with the beholder. As long as he stood on shore, he felt himself intimate with the now harmless power and superior to its enormous might, for he was beyond its reach. When he reminded himself of the dangers he had undergone the evening before, the agony and wrath he had endured in his combat against this brutal enemy, which he had succeeded in eluding, he smiled in magnanimity toward the vanquished and beaten foe, which was after all only a blind tool at the wind's service, and was now stretching itself out to resume its rest in the sunlight.

This was East Skerries, the classical, for they have their old history, have lived long, flourished, and declined, the old East Skerries that in the Middle Ages were a great fishing port where that important article stromling was caught, and for which a special law of guild was given and is still maintained up to to-day. The stromling serve the same purpose in middle Sweden and Norrland as the herring does on the west coast and in Norway, being only a kind of herring, a product of the Baltic Sea, and suited to its small resources. It was sought during the time when herring were scarce and dear, and less sought after when they were plentiful. It has been for ages the winter food for middle Sweden, and was eaten so continually that a song is still preserved from the days of Queen Christina's enticing Frenchmen into the country, who complained of the eternal hard bread and infinite stromling. A man's age ago the great land-owners paid their laborers' wages in natural products which consisted mostly of herring; after herring-fishing declined they substituted salt stromling. The price rose and the fishing which previously had been managed moderately and for domestic use, now became an eager speculation. The shoals of the East Skerries which are the richest on the coast of Sodermanland, began to be used on a large scale, the fish were disturbed during spawning time, the meshes of the nets were made closer and closer, and as a natural consequence the fish diminished, not so much from extermination perhaps as from the fact that they left their former spawning places and sought the depths where as yet no fisherman has had the resolution to search for the flown prey.

The learned puzzled long with investigations over the cause of the diminution of the stromling supply, but the Academy of Agriculture took the initiative, by appointing skillful fish commissioners, both to learn the cause and find a remedy.

This was now Commissioner Borg's mission at the East Skerries for the summer. The place was not lively as the Skerries are not situated on one of the main courses to Stockholm. The big vessels from the south usually pass by Landsort, Dalaro and Vaxholm, those from the east, and during certain winds, even those from the south, seek passage by Sandham and Vaxholm, while the merchants' vessels from Norrland and Finland pass between Furusund and Vaxholm.

The eastern route is mostly used in case of necessity by the Esthonians, who as a rule come from south-east, and by others in case of wind, current and storm, who lie over at Landsort and Sandham. Therefore the place has only a third-class custom house station under one surveyor, and a little department of pilots who are under control of Dalaro.

It is the end of the world—quiet, still, abandoned, except during fishing time, fall and spring, and if there comes only a single pleasure yacht during mid-summer it is greeted as an apparition from a lighter, gayer world; but fish commissioner Borg, who had come on another errand—to "spy," as the people called it—was greeted with a noticeable coolness which had found its first utterance in the indifference of the past evening and now took its expression in a miserable and cold coffee which was brought to his chamber.

Although gifted with a keen sense of taste, he had acquired through strong exercise an ability to restrain unpleasant perceptions, therefore he swallowed the drink at a draught and arising went down to see his environment and greet the people.

When he passed the custom-house man's cottage everything was hushed and it seemed as though the occupants would make themselves invisible —they shut the doors, and stopped talking in order not to be betrayed.

With this unpleasant impression of being unwelcome, he continued his promenade out on the rock and came down to the harbor. There was a group of small huts all of the simplest construction just as though piled from pickings of stone shingles with a little smattering of mortar here and there; the chimney alone was of brick, rising above the fireplace. At one corner was a patched-up wooden addition for storage, at another only a shed of driftwood and twigs, a harbor for swine, which were shipped here during the fishing season for fattening. The windows seemed to have been taken from shipwrecks, and the roof was covered with everything that had length and width, and would absorb or shed rain—kelp, sand-oats, moss, peat, earth. These were the shelters now standing deserted, each of which housed about twenty sleepers during the big fishing season, when every hut was a kitchen bar.

Outside the most prominent shanty stood the head man of the island, fisherman Oman, scratching out a flounder net with a whip. He did not in the least consider himself beneath a fish commissioner, nevertheless he felt a pressure from this presence and bristling up, prepared to answer sharply.

"Is the fishing good?" greeted the instructor.

"Not yet, but it may be now that the government has come to do it," answered Oman impolitely.

"Where do the stromling shoals lie?" asked the commissioner, relinquishing the government to its fate.

"Oh! we thought the instructor knew better than we did, as he is paid to teach us," said Oman.

"See here, you only know where the shoals lie, but I know where the stromling are, which is a straw nearer."

"So," rallied Oman. "If we dip into the sea we shall get fish!—well one is never too old to learn."

The wife came out of the cottage and began a lively talk with her husband, so that the commissioner found it unprofitable to confer longer with the hostile fisherman, and started toward the harbor.

Some pilots were sitting on the pier who zealously increased their conversation and seemed inclined not to notice him.

He would not turn back but continued toward the strand, leaving the habitations behind. The naked rock lay waste, without a tree, without a bush, for everything that fire could burn was destroyed. He walked along the water's edge, sometimes in fine soft sand, sometimes on stones. When he had continued an hour, always turning to the right, he found himself in the same place from which he had started, with a feeling of being in captivity. The hillock of the little island crushed him, and the sea's horizontal circle oppressed him, the old feeling of not having room enough came over him, and he climbed to the highest plateau of the hillock, which was about fifty feet above the sea level. There he lay down on his back and looked up into space. Now when his eyes could behold nothing, neither land nor sea, and he saw only the blue cupola over him, he felt free, isolated, as a cosmic particle floating in the ether only obeying the law of gravitation. He fancied he was perfectly alone upon the globe, the earth was only a vehicle in which he rode on its orbit, and he heard in the wind's faint rustle only the air draft that the planet in its speed would awake in the ether, and in the din of the waves he perceived the splashing which the liquid must make as the big reservoir rolled round its axle. All reminiscences of fellow creatures, community, law, customs, had blown away, now that he did not see a single fragment of the earth to which he was bound. He let his thoughts run like calves let loose, dashing over all obstacles, all considerations, and therewith intoxicated himself to stupefaction, as the India navel reverencers, who forgot both heaven and earth in contemplating an inferior external part of themselves.

Commissioner Borg was not a nature worshiper any more than were those navel worshipers of India. On the contrary he was a self-conscious being, standing highest in the terrestrial chain of creation and entertained certain contempt for the lower forms of existence, understanding very well that what the self-conscious spirit produces is partly more subtle than that of the unconscious nature, and above all else has more advantages to man, who creates his creations with regard to the usefulness and beauty they may afford to their creator. Out of nature he brought forth raw material for his work, and although both light and air could be produced by machine, he preferred the sun's unexcellable ether vibrations, and the atmosphere's inexhaustible well of oxygen. He loved nature as an assistant, as an inferior who could serve him, and it pleased him that he was able to fool this powerful adversary to place its resources at his disposal.

After having lain an uncertain time and felt the great rest of absolute solitude, freedom from influences, from pressure, he arose and went down to seek his room.

When he entered his empty chamber it reëchoed his footsteps and he felt himself entrapped. The white quadrant and rectangles that enclosed the room where he must dwell, reminded him of human hands, but of a low order, mastering only the simple forms of inorganic nature. He was enclosed in a crystal, a hexaëdron or the like, and the straight lines and the congruent surfaces, shaped his thoughts into squares, and ruled his soul in lines, simplifying it from the organic life's liberty of forms, and reduced his brain's rich tropical vegetation of changing perceptions to nature's first childish attempt at classifying.

After he had called to the girl and let her bring in his chests, he began at once the transformation of the room.

His first care was to regulate the entrance of light by a pair of heavy garnet Persian curtains, that instantly gave the room a softer tone. He opened the two leaves of the big dining table and the emptiness of the big white floor was filled at once, but the white surface of the table was still disturbing, so he concealed it under an oilcloth of a solid warm moss-green color which harmonized with the curtains and was restful. Then he placed his book shelves against the poorest wall. This certainly was not an improvement as they only striped it in columns like a time-table, and the white plastering contrasted more against the black walnut colored wood, but he would first outline the whole before he went into details.

From a nail in the ceiling he hung his bed curtains, this made as it were, a room within the room, and the dormitory was separated from the sitting room, as though under a tent.

The long white floor planks with their black: parallel cracks, where dirt from shoes, dust from furniture and clothes, tobacco ashes, scrubbing water and broom splinters, formed hot beds for fungi and hiding places for wood worms, he covered here and there with rugs of different colors and patterns, which lay like verdant blooming islets on the big white flat.

Now that there was color and warmth added to the space he began to give the finishing touches. He had first to create a forge, an altar to labor which would be the center round which everything would be grouped and radiating from it. Therefore he placed his big lamp on the writing table, it was two feet high and rose like a lighthouse upon the green cloth, its painted china stand with arabesques, flowers and animals, which bore no resemblance to ordinary ones, but gave a cheerful coloring and reminded with their ornaments, of the human spirit's power to outrage nature's unchangeable shapes. Here had the painter transformed a stiff spear thistle to a clinging vine, and forced a rabbit to stretch himself out like a crocodile, and with a gun between his fore paws with their tiger claw nails, to aim at a hunter with a fox's head.

Round the lamp he placed a microscope, diopter, scales, plumb bobs, and a sounding rod, whose varnished brasses diffused a warm sunlight yellow.

The inkstand, a big cube of glass cut in facets, which gave it the faint blue light of water or ice, the penholders of porcupine quills which suggested animal life with their indefinite oily coloring, sticks of sealing wax in loud cinnabar, pen boxes with variegated labels, scissors with cold steel glance, cigar dishes in lac and gold, paper knife of bronze, all that mass of small trifles of use and beauty soon filled the big table abundantly with points on which the eye could rest a moment getting an impression, a memory, an impulse, keeping it always active and never fatiguing.

Now for filling the spaces in the book shelves, and blow the breath of life into the vacuum between the dark boards. There soon stood row upon row a variegated collection of reference and handbooks, from which the owner could get enlightenment on all that had happened in the past and present time. Encyclopedias, which like an air telegraph answered with a pressure on the right letter. Text-books in history, philosophy, archeology, and natural sciences, journeys in all lands with maps, all of Baedeker's handbooks so that the owner could sit at home and plan the shortest and cheapest route to this or that place, and decide which hotel, and know how much to give in drink money. But as all of these works have an inevitable seed of decay, he had manned a special shelf with an observation corps of scientific journals from which he could immediately obtain reports concerning even the smallest advancements of knowledge, even the slightest discoveries. And at last a whole collection of skeleton keys to all present knowledge, in bibliographical notices, publishers' catalogues, book-sellers' newspapers, so that he, shut up in his room, could see precisely how high or low the barometer stood with all the science that concerned him.

When he regarded the wall with the book shelf, it seemed to him as though the room was now for the first time inhabited by living beings. These books gave the impression of individuals for there were not two works of the same exterior. One was a Baedeker in scarlet and gold, like one who on a Monday morning leaves all behind him and travels away from sorrow.

Others solemn, dressed in black, a whole procession, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, and all the many paper covered ones in light, gay, easy, spring coats, the salmon red Revue des deux Mondes, the lemon yellow Comtemporaine, the rush green Fortnightly, the grass green Morgenländische. From the backs big names saluted him as acquaintances whom he had in his chamber, and here he had the best part of them, more than they could give a traveler who came on a visit to trouble their dinner naps or breakfast.

With the writing table and the book shelves placed in order, he felt himself recovered after the voyage's disturbing influences; his soul regained its strength since his implements were accessible, these instruments and books which had grown fast to his being as new senses, as other organs stronger and finer than those nature had given him as an inheritance.

The occasional attack of fear which was caused from isolation, solitude and from being pent-up with enemies—for thus he considered the fishermen, with reason—gave way before the quiet which the installment must induce, and now, the headquarters being raised, he sat down as a well-armed general to plan for the campaign.

[CHAPTER THIRD]

The wind had shifted north-east during the night and the drifting ice had floated down from Aland, when the commissioner took his boat to make a preparatory investigation of the quality of the sea's bottom depth of water, sea flora and sea fauna.

A pilot who was with him as oarsman, soon became tired of giving explanations, when he saw that the commissioner by means of chart, sounding lead and other different instruments, found out facts that he had never thought of. Where the shoals lay was known to the pilot, and he also knew on which shoal the stromling nets should be set, but the commissioner was not satisfied with this and began to dredge at different depths, taking up small creatures and vegetable slime on which he believed the stromling fed. He lowered the lead to the bottom and drew up samples of clay, sand, mud, mold and gravel, which he assorted, numbered and placed in small glasses with labels.

Finally he took out a big spyglass which resembled a speaking trumpet, and looked down into the sea. The pilot had never dreamed that one could gaze into the water with an instrument and in his astonishment asked permission to place his eye to the glass and look down into the mysteries.

The commissioner on the one hand would not play wizard, and on the other did not desire hastily to solve the problem which time would clear up, or to inspire too high hopes about the results, he therefore granted the pilot's entreaty and gave some popular explanation of the living pictures which were unfolding down in the depths.

"Do you see that seaweed upon the shoal?" began the commissioner, "and do you see that it is first olive yellow, lower down liver colored and at the bottom red? That comes from the diminution of light!"

He took a few pulls at the oars, off the shallow, and kept constantly to lee of the rock so as to keep free from the drifting ice.

"What do you see now?" he asked the man who lay on his stomach.

"Oh Jesus! I think it is stromling, and they are standing close, as close as cards in a pack."

"Do you see now that the stromling go not on the shallows only, and do you understand now that one could catch them from the depths, and do you believe now when I tell you that one ought never to fish them on the shallows where they only go up to spawn where the eggs are reached by the sun's heat better than in deep water?"

The commissioner rowed on until he saw the water become greenish gray on account of the nature of the clay bottom.

"What do you see now?" he continued, meanwhile resting on the oars.

"I believe, on my soul, there are serpents on the sea bottom! there are real serpents' tails sticking out of the mud—and there are their heads."

"They are eels, my boy!" informed the commissioner.

The pilot looked incredulous for he had never heard of eels in the sea, but the commissioner would not give out his best card in advance or lavish long explanations over intricate things, therefore he left the oars and, taking his water telescope, leaned over the gunwale for observation.

He seemed to seek something with uncommon ardor, something that must be there, on this or that shoal but which he naturally had not seen there before, never having investigated that water.

They rowed around for two hours as the commissioner indicated, sometimes letting down his dredge, sometimes the lead line, and after each haul lying face downwards and looking through the glass into the water. His pale face contracted from the efforts and the eyes sunk into his head while the hand which held the tube trembled and the arms seemed stiff and numb as a stake. The cold, humid wind, which passed through the pilot's jacket did not seem to bite the frail figure which was only wrapped in a half-buttoned spring coat. His eyes watered from the sea wind and the endeavor to look sharply down into the half-impenetrable element which forms three-quarters of the earth's surface, about the life of which the other quarter generally knows so little and guesses so much.

Through the water telescope, which was not of his invention, but one he had made from what he had heard from bridge builders and laborers in marine blasting, he saw down into a lower world from which the great creation above the waters had been evolved. The forest of seaweed which had just advanced over the border from inorganic to organic life, swayed in the cold bottom current and resembled whites of eggs just coagulated, borrowing their shape from the surf and recalling frost flowers, when water freezes on the window pane. Down in the depths the kelp spread out like big parks with golden leaves, over which the inhabitants of the sea bottom dragged themselves on their bellies seeking cold and obscurity, concealing their shame of being behind in their long wandering toward the sun and air. Lowest down in the clay the flounder rests, partly dug into the ooze, lazy, immovable, without inventive faculty to develop a swim-bladder with which to raise himself, waiting a happy chance that leads the prey past his nose, without the impulse of turning the random to his advantage, and from pure laziness having twisted and stretched himself until his eyes for convenience' sake have stopped on the right side of the twisted head.

The blenny has already put one pair of oars out forward, but is loaded down by the stern and reminds one of the first trial at boat building, showing between the kelp's heraldic foliage his architectonic stone head with a Croat's mustache, lifting himself a moment from the mud to sink again immediately into it.

The lump sucker with its seven ridges goes with a keel to the air, the whole fish one enormous nose, smelling only for food and females, lighting for a moment the blue-green water with its rose-colored belly, spreading a faint aurora around him down in the gloom, and hugging again quickly a stone with his sucker to await the issue of the millions of years, which shall bring delivery to those left behind in the endless path of evolution.

The dreadful sea scorpion, that fury incarnate, with malice expressed in the spines of its face, whose swimming limbs are claws, but more for torturing than for attack or defense, lying on one side pining for enjoyment, and caressing his own body with his slimy tail.

Higher up in lighter and warmer water swims the handsome but profound thinking perch, perhaps the most characteristic fish of the Baltic Sea, well built and steady but still somewhat clumsy as a Koster boat, bearing the peculiar blue-green color of the Baltic and a Norseman's temper, part philosopher part pirate, a sociable hermit, a superficial creature who likes to seek the depths, and sometimes reaches them, idle and eccentric. He stands during long leisure moments and stares at the stones on the beach until awakening he darts off like an arrow, tyrant against his own but soon tamed, returns willingly to the same place, and harbors seven intestinal worms.

And then the eagle of the sea, the king of Baltic fishes, the light-built, cutter-rigged pike, who loves the sun and, as the strongest, needs not shun the light, who stands with his nose at the surface of the water, sleeping with the sun in his eyes, dreaming of the flowery fields and birch pastures yonder, where he can never go, and of the thin blue cupola which arches over his wet world, where he would smother, and yet where the birds are swimming lightly with their feathery pectoral-fins.

The boat had come between floating pieces of ice which cast moving shadows over the kelp parks on the bottom, like scattered clouds. The commissioner, who had searched several hours without finding what he sought, lifted the telescope out of the water, dried it and laid it aside.

Then he dropped upon the stern sheets and holding his hand before his eyes as though to rest them from impression, seemed buried in sleep for some minutes after which he gave the pilot a signal to row on.

The commissioner, who had given his attention the whole forenoon to the depth seemed now for the first time to observe the grand panorama which was unfolding on the sea surface. Ultra-marine blue the water segment extended some distance ahead of the boat, until the drifting ice showed a perfect arctic landscape. Islands, bays, coves, and sounds marked as on a map, and where the ice rode up on the reef, mountains had formed, through one block pressing down another and the following climbing up on the preceding. Over the rocks the ice had likewise piled up, made arches, formed caves and built towers, church-ruins, casemates, bastions. The enchantment in these formations lay in the fact that they seemed to have been shaped by an enormous human hand, for they had not the unconscious nature's chance forms, they reminded of human inventions in past historical periods. There had blocks piled into Cyclopean walls, arranged themselves in terraces as the Assyrian-greek temple, here had the waves through repeated impact dug out a Roman barrel vault, and fretted a round arch, which had sunken to an Arabian moresque, out of which the sunbeams and the spray from the waves had hacked out stalactites and bicelles, and here out of an already heaped wall, the whole wave front had eaten a line of arches of a Roman aqueduct, there stood the foundation to a mediæval castle, marking the remains of tumble down lancet arches, flying buttresses and pinnacles.

This fluctuation of thoughts between arctic landscapes and historicized architecture brought the contemplator into a peculiar frame of mind, out of which he was drawn by the noisy life which roving flocks of birds were making all around on floating islands of ice and on the clear blue waters.

In flocks of hundreds and hundreds floated the eider ducks, which were resting here, while waiting for open water to Norrland. The insignificant rust brown females were surrounded by the gorgeous males, who floated high with their snow white backs, sometimes rising for a short flight, exposing their soot black breasts. Loons in small flocks showing their miniver breasts, their reptile necks and drooping checkered wings. Legions of lively, long-tailed ducks in black and white, swimming, diving, skimming. The guillemots and sea parrots in small bands, mournful coal black scoters in marauding parties, contrasting with goosanders and red-breasted mergansers, a more brilliant retinue with panaches on their necks, and over the whole diving and fluttering host of birds that live an amphibious life hovered the mews and gulls, which had already selected the air for their element, only using the water for fishing and bathing.

Smuggled into this industrial world of labor, on the point half hidden sat a solitary crow, his low brow, his doubtful color, his thievish manner, his criminal type, great shyness for water, and dirty look made him an object of hatred to the strugglers who knew the nest plunderer, the egg sucker.

From the whole of this winged world, whose throats could set atmospheric air in vibration, above the heads of the mutes down in the water, was heard an accordant sound, from the reptile's first faint trial to utter wrath by hissing, up to the music from the harmonious vocal organs of man. There hissed his mate as a viper when the eider duck would bite her neck and trample her under the water, there quacked the goosander as a frog, and the terns shrieked and mews cawed, the gulls emitted childlike cries, the eider ducks cooed as male cats in rut time, but highest over all and therefore the most charming, sounded the long-tailed ducks' wonderful music, for as yet it was not a song. An untuned triad in major, sounding as the herdsman's horn, no matter how or when it struck in with the three notes of the others making an incomplete accord, a canon for the hunting horn without end or beginning, reminiscences from the childhood of the human race, from the earliest ages of the herdsman and the hunter.

It was not with the poet's dreamy fancy, with gloomy and therefore disquieting feelings and confused perceptions, that the contemplator enjoyed the big drama. It was with the calm of the investigator, the awakened thinker, that he viewed the relations in this seeming confusion, and it was only through the accumulated vast material of recollections that he could connect all these objects viewed with each other. He searched for the causes of the mighty impression of especially this nature, and when he found answers, he experienced the immense enjoyment that the most highly developed in the chain of creation must feel, when the veils are lifted from the occult, the bliss which has followed every creature on the infinite course toward light, and which perhaps constitutes the driving power forwards to knowledge from dreaming, a bliss which must resemble that of a supposed conscious creator who is cognizant of what he has done.

This landscape took him back to Primeval Ages, when the earth was covered with water and the tops of the highest mountains were beginning to rise above the surface. These islands around him still retained their primeval character with the earliest formed crust of granite up in daylight.

Down in the water, where the algæ of the period of cooling appeared, swam the Primary Age fishes and among them their oldest descendant, the herring, whilst on the islands still grew carboniferous ferns and lichens. Farther in on the mainland, but first on the largest islets, the Secondary Age's pines and reptiles would be found, and still farther in, the deciduous trees and mammals of the Tertiary Age, but out here in primeval formation whimsical nature seemed to have leaped over the stratification periods and thrown seals and otters down in primeval times, casting in the ice period on the morning of this day in the quarto period, just as soil on primitive rocks, and he himself was sitting as a representative of the historical times, undisturbed by the evident confusion, enjoying these living pictures of creation and raising the enjoyment through feeling himself the highest in this chain.

The secret of the fascination of the landscape was that it, and only it offered a historicized creation with exclusions and abbreviations, where one in a few hours could roam through the series of formations of the earth and finally stop at oneself; where one could refresh himself with a resume of perceptions, that led the thoughts back to the origin, resting in the past stages, relaxing the fatiguing tension to win higher degrees on the scale of culture, just as to relapse into a wholesome trance and feel one with nature. It was such moments that he used as a compensation for the past-away religious enjoyments, when thoughts of heaven were only an exchanged shape of incentive forward and the feeling of immortality was disguised uttering of the foreknowledge of the indestructibility of matter.

How serene to feel oneself at home on this earth, which was delineated to him in childhood as the valley of lamentation, which was only to be wandered through on the way to the unknown; how firm and full of trust to have gained knowledge of what was unknown before, to have been permitted to have seen into, to have looked through God's hitherto secret counsel, as it was called, all those events which were regarded impenetrable, and therefore at that time could not be penetrated. Now man had reached perspicuity about human origin and purpose, but instead of becoming weary and going to rest as one cultured nation after another have done when they have thought until destroyed, the now living generation had taken its part and acquiesced in finding themselves to be the highest animals, and exerted themselves in a judicious way actually realizing the heaven idea here, therefore the present time was the best and greatest of all times, it has carried humanity farther forward than centuries before had been able to do.

After these moments of devotional exercise in thoughts of his origin and destiny, the commissioner let his mind run over his personal evolution, as far back as he could trace it, just as though to search for his own self, and in the past stages read his probable fate.

He saw his father, a deceased fortification major of that undecided type of the beginning of the century, mixed as a conglomerate, and cemented of fragments from preceding periods, picked at random after the great eruption at the end of the past century, believing in nothing because he had seen everything perish, everything taken up anew, all forms of state tested, greeted with jubilee at reception, worsted within a few years, brought forth again as new and greeted over again as a universal discovery, he had at last stopped at the existing state as the only palpable, it may have come from a leading will, which was improbable, or from a combination of chances which was tolerably sure, but dangerous to say. Through study at the university his father had come into the pantheism of the young-Hegelians, which was a feint at turning the current which had then reached its height, and individuals had become the only reality and God became the comprehension of the personal in humanity. The living idea about the intimate relation of man to nature, that man himself stood highest in line in the chain of the world's process, characterized an elite corps of personalities, who silently despised the repeated attempts of political visionaries to place themselves above the governing laws of nature, trying in an artificial way to make new laws for the world through philosophical systems and congressional decrees. Unobserved they passed on of no use to either high or low, above they saw mediocrities through natural selection amassing around a mediocre monarch, below they found ignorance, credulity and blindness, while between these two classes the burghers were bent on business interests so positively that those who were not merchants themselves were unable to work together with them. As they were qualified, prudent and trustworthy they were occasionally promoted to positions of influence, but as they could not join with any party and had no desire to make a useless individual opposition and were not numerous enough to form a herd, besides as strong individualists would not follow a bell-cow, they remained pretty quiet carrying their discontent hidden under big crosses and decorations and smiled as augurs when they met at the councilor's table or in the house of noblemen, letting the world pass as it might.

The father belonged to certainly not a very old noble family, but one which through civil merits in retrieving the mining business and not: through doubtful exploits of war gained by the help of nature's chances or an enemy's false step, had been rewarded by a coat of arms and moderate privileges, such as to wear a nobleman's uniform and unpaid to participate in one-fourth of the ponderous administration of the country. He counted himself therefore a meritorious noble and was conscious of having come from talented ancestors, which acted as a spur down to their now living representative. Property legally acquired through the qualities and labors of his ancestors gave him the opportunity to perfect himself in his calling. He became a prominent topographer, and had participated in the building of Gota canal and in the first railroad constructions. This employment at a whole kingdom, which he had become used to look at from above and to take in at one glance on the map spread over a writing table, gave his mind gradually the habit of seeing everything on a grand scale. There he sat with a rule opening communication lines which would change the whole physiognomy, of the landscape, leveling old cities and creating new, changing the prices of products, seeking for new resources. The maps should change, the old water ways be forgotten and the black straight lines which indicated the new roads would be the determinative. The heights should be just as fertile as the valleys, the combat of the rivers should cease, frontiers between realms and countries should no more be observed.

There followed a strong feeling of power through this handling of the fates of lands and peoples, and he could not escape gradual seizures of the propensity accompanying power, to overestimate himself. Everything miraged in a bird's-eye-view, countries became maps and human beings tin soldiers, and when the topographer in a few weeks ordered the leveling of a height, which would have needed thousands of years to be denuded by natural agencies, he felt something of the creator in himself. When he ordered tunnels bored, transferred sand ridges to lakes, and filled up marshes, he did not fail to perceive that he had taken in hand a remodeling of the earth ball, throwing the natural geological formations topsy-turvy, and therewith his personal feelings swelled incredibly.

Hereto was added his position as officer with numerous subordinates, whom he only communicated with as one in authority, and who consequently were considered as service muscles to his big determining brain.

With a military's physical courage and resolution, the profoundness of a savant, the full deliberation of a thinker, the calm of one financially independent, and the dignity and self-esteem of a man of honor, he exhibited a type of the highest rank, where beauty and prudence combined to produce a well-measured, harmonious personality.

In this father the son had both a prototype and a teacher, the mother having died early. To spare the son the bitterness of miscalculations, and disapproving the whole current method of education, which with books of tales and terrifying histories, educated the children to be children instead of men, he raised at once the whole curtain of the temple of life and initiated the youth in the difficult art of life; taught him the intimate connection between human beings and the remainder of the creation, where certainly the human being stood highest on his planet, but still continued to remain a part of the creation, able in a measure to modify the action of the forces in nature but nevertheless ruled by them, this was a rational nature worship if nature signifies everything existing, and worshiping is an acknowledgment of the dependency of the existing laws of nature. By this he removed Christianity's mania for greatness of individuals, fear of the unknown, death and God, and created a prudent man, watchful of his actions and personally accountable for his deeds. The regulator of the lower propensities of human beings he found in the organ, which through its perfected form separates the human being from the beasts, the cerebrum. Judgment, founded on liberal knowledge should govern, and when necessary suppress the lower propensities to keep up a higher type. Nourishment and propagation were the lowest impulses, and therefore in common with the plants. The sensibilities, as the animals? lower rudiments of thinking were called, because they were localized in the arteries, spinal cord and other lower organs, must be absolutely subordinate to the cerebrum in a human being of the highest type, and the individuals, who could not regulate their lower impulses but were thinking with their spinal cord, were of the lower form. Therefore the old man warned against believing in youthful enchantment and enthusiasm, which could just as easily lead to crime as to virtue. This, however did not exclude the great passions of universal benefit, which did not belong to the feelings but were powerful utterances of the will toward good. All that youth could produce was completely worthless, for as a rule it lacked originality, being only the pure thoughts of older predecessors which the after-coming youths had taken up as their own and with great gestures would spread abroad. Originality could only be said to develop when the brain had matured, just as true propagation with a following education of the offspring could only take place when man had reached virility and had the ability to provide means for existence and education of the children. A sure sign of the immature brain's inability to judge was the constant Grossenwahn, in which youth and women were living. Youth has its future before it, as is habitually said, but that assertion is shattered because manhood shows a less per cent, of mortality than youth, and the unwitty reply that if youth is a fault it passes away in time, does not overturn the precept, that youth is a present defect, an imperfection, thus a fault, which is admitted by the acknowledgment that it can pass away, for that which never existed cannot pass away. All youthful attacks on the existing are hysterical spells of the inability of the weak to bear pressure, an evidence of the same lack of prudence as in the hornet when attacking a human being to its own sure destruction. As a good illustration of the want of judgment and syllogism in the youths he brought forth the book Robinson Crusoe, which was written for the plain purpose of showing the inferiority of a life under natural conditions and isolation, and yet for a century it had regularly been misunderstood by youths as a psalm to savage life while the book represented it as a punishment for the foolish youth who abused culture's wealth like a savage. This little trait at the same time showed of how much lower ontological form youth was, betraying it in his sympathy for Indians and other rudimentary laggers-behind, just as the feelings which eventually would be laid aside, like the thyroid gland, which has come into disuse by human beings but still remains on its old place.

When the son could not refute these bitter truths with rational arguments, declaring that his feelings, yes his most sacred feelings, rose against such a dry tenet, the father declared him to be a hornet which was still thinking with ganglia, and he warned him against dissolute fancies, or conclusions on insufficient ground and want of great material, not to be mistaken for scientific quick-reasoning, where from seemingly few premises—appearing few because the middle terms were omitted—new conclusions could be drawn, when, as if by a chemical union, two older ideas enter each other and form a new thought. Ontogenism had shown how the human fœtus was developed through all the earlier stages from the amœba through the frog and up to the anthropomorphic, how then could the youth question but that the spirit of a child must pass through the history of man through the animal and the savage upward, as long as the body was growing and that consequently man stood far ahead of youth! He warned him especially not to let the lowest of all our propensities, the sexual impulse cloud his judgment, for by its power it had so long dazzled sound reason, that erudite men still bore the superstition that woman was as high a type as man, yes even higher according to the opinion of some men, whereas she really is but an intermediate form between man and child, as is shown by the fœtal development, where the male at a certain stage is female but the female never male. To warn the young man of the danger of being over-powered by sexual impulses, was the same as to cast a shadow on woman, and the son soon commenced to make what the father called ganglionic conclusions, the bearing of which was that the Lieutenant-Colonel was a woman hater. And how could he do otherwise, when always hearing his father narrating how this or that man had thrown away his future on affairs with women, and how great geniuses had wasted their talents by procreation, and sacrificed happiness and position for a wife, who had been faithless and children who died before of mature age. Propagation was only for the lesser spirits, the greater ones should live in their works, and so forth.

Under such guidance the son grew up. He was born an unusually delicate child but with a harmoniously developed body; he had finely organized senses, quick and sure perception, keen understanding and a nobility of mind which manifested itself in forbearance and approachableness to mankind. He understood early how to regulate his life, to suppress the plant and animal propensities, and when he had accumulated a vast material of observations and knowledge, he began to work it up. His brain soon showed its prolific capacity—from a couple of known quantities to find the wanted unknown, from old thoughts to produce new ones, in a word the capacity of what is called originality. He was the coming regenerator and possessed ability to see the inter-relations in disorder, to discover the invisible force behind the phenomena, and even the concealed and extremely compound motives in the actions of men. Therefore his schoolmates looked upon him with suspicion, and the teachers discerned in him a silent critic of what they communicated as unalterable facts.

His arrival at the university occurred contemporarily with the great popular movements which concerned the parliamentary reform. Borg perceived well the defects of the representation by a four-class system, while the state consists of at least twenty classes with different interests and different abilities to judge in so complicated a problem as that of the government of a people, but on the other hand he could not consent to revert to the organization of the hord or tribe where everybody had equally much or equally little to say. He perceived at once that this simplifying of the method of governing, where the multitude should do it was not a reform suited to the needs of the time, moreover he had lately seen the right of universal suffrage in France produce an Emperor and a sham representation of lawyers, merchants and army officers, with the exclusion of laborers, farmers, savants and scientific men, thus only three classes, arbitrarily selected by the Emperor, were represented. He had calculated that the most correct would be a perfect class representation with proportional rights of representation, well balanced according to the interests of the respective classes and with due consideration given to the highest interests, or the higher right of the wise to own the preponderance, as they promote progress more than the ignorant. This, to be sure, the authors of the two chamber systems had already had in mind, when they perceived the necessity of referring questions to committees and disentangling certain questions by special committees, even by committees of experts. To complete the assembly, so that all interests would be guarded and all points taken and all information of the condition of the realm made accessible, each class of people, from the highest to the lowest, should elect representatives in proportion partly to their numbers and partly to their importance for the advancement of the country as a whole. Neglecting the Royal Court, which together with the monarch ought to be assorted under the foreign department, to which they properly belong, for the monarch is only permitted to represent the nation before foreign powers, this consultative, though not a legislative, class parliament would be constructed as follows, viz., First class: land owners and renters, tenants, overseers, foremen on farms and so forth. The second class: operators of mines and quarries, manufacturers and their laborers. Third class: merchants, mariners, pilots, hotel owners, porters, hackmen, and all employed in banks, custom houses, postal service, railroads and telegraphs. Fourth class: civil and military officers, clergymen, with servants, janitors and privates. Fifth class: savants, teachers, literateurs, and artists. Sixth class: physicians, apothecaries, superintendents of poorhouses. Seventh class: house owners, capitalists and rentiers.

In what proportion to elect from each class was the question, which could not be solved off hand, but it was necessary that skillful men with knowledge in the science of government should probe the new order of representation, which would therefore only and always be provisional. Over this consultative assembly should sit a council of specialists in the science of government, who had been professionally trained for that difficult calling, so that this most complicated of all arts would not be pursued by bunglers and enterprising amateurs, as had hitherto been done, and statesmen's accession to office would be preceded by a careful investigation of their past life, their private financial and social situation. This would spur youth to self-education and heedfulness of what they were doing, and would form a body of excellent men, while so called irreproachable conduct, or negative virtue, without talents would not as hitherto be the short cut to advancement. This would constitute the new nobility which would succeed the old military and court nobility, and the fact that this nobility established itself only through a natural selection of the fittest was a guarantee that the country would be ruled in the best manner. The Reichstag by only having to vote an opinion, not any decision, would thus furnish a vast material of investigation, not a legionary army that could be bribed and wheedled to commit voting outrages.

The young man, however, was too prudent to express his opinions, at a period, when noblemen were synonymous with the degenerated, left behind and blasé, and the masses were pushing so blindly forward that the mechanics were the ones that worked mostly into the hands of their coming class enemies, the peasants; a prudent man could only smile and wait. And he waited until he saw the four-chamber system succeeded by a one-class representation, when the realm was henceforth governed by the former peasantry alone. These historical events had, however, a very great influence in directing the young man's thoughts and development. He had there seen in what terrible confusion the thought mechanism of the majority was, and when he read the protocols of the Reichstag, and noticed the speeches of the most influential and brilliant speakers, he observed that what he called ganglionic reasoning, causing valvular contraction and congestion of the heart, exerted the greatest influence on the public opinion. It seemed to him sometimes as though it was not the question of the fatherland or progress, but only the motionary's triumph to gain his own will by fallacies, gross blunders in logic and hideous distortions of facts. In him was aroused, through observation, the great suspicion that everything was intended as a struggle for power, for the enjoyment of using the power of the brain for putting other brains into consonance, of sowing seeds of thought in the brain bark of others, where they would grow as parasites like the mistletoe, while the mother tree would proudly lift her shoulders at the thought that the parasites up in the crown still were nothing but parasites. This was the foundation of his ambition, to satisfy which required knowledge and experience through study, travel and conversation with learned and illustrious men. In the midst of this eternally movable chaos of contending forces and interests, he sought a place of anchorage for his being, the center of the sphere which reality threw around him—in himself. Instead of, like weak Christians assuming an external support in God, he took the real, palpable in his own self and sought to create his personality to a perfect type of man whose life and deeds would not violate anyone's rights, convinced that the fruit of a well-nursed tree could not fail to be of use and rejoicing to others. All the confusion and awkwardness that he saw in the struggles of those who say they are living for others while in reality they only live on others, on others' gratitude, others' opinion and others' acknowledgment, he avoided, holding his own straight course convinced that a single great and strong individual could not help doing more good than these masses of thoughtless people whose numbers stand in inverse ratio to their usefulness.

By this setting of his ego he enforced a norm for his life, which led him to a high degree of morality, for, instead of relinquishing the final settlement to the uncertain hereafter, he regulated his deeds so that he had nothing left unsettled, he did not shift the blame from himself to an innocently suffering Christ, but in conscious self-responsibility he committed no acts that would awaken the need of a scapegoat.

Thereby he learned to rely only upon himself and never to take advice, always reflecting on the probable consequences of an act. This did not prevent him from suffering with nervousness like his generation, which was born and brought up during the period of steam and electricity when the vital activity was increased in speed. How could it be otherwise considering that he must destroy millions of old brain cells, storages for antiquated impressions, that every moment when he would form a judgment, he must carefully sift out superannuated axioms, which tried to come forward as premises. It was a work of total reconstruction which caused these disorders in the nervous system which are all laid to our ancestors' alcoholism and sexual excesses, but which pathological symptom was an uttering of increased vitality accompanied by extreme sensibility, like the crawfish when it shifts its shell, or the bird when molting. It was the regeneration of a genus or at least a variety of man which appeared to the old as diseased or unsound because it was in a process of development, something that they were disinclined to acknowledge as they themselves would be the norm and called themselves sound, although they were in a state of decomposition.

This nervous sensibility of the growing youth was enhanced by moderation in eating and drinking, and vigorous disciplining of the sexual desires. He found it debasing to place oneself into the ungovernable state of a lunatic or a savage through the use of fermented drinks, and his soul was far too aristocratic to play a moment's illicit love with a prostitute. With this, however, followed an increasing acuteness of the senses and a sensibility to disagreeable impressions which sometimes brought him disgust where others of a coarser nature would have found enjoyment.

Thus he felt abased for a few hours when his morning coffee was not strong enough, and a poorly painted billiard ball or a soiled cue constrained him to turn away in search of another place. A badly wiped glass raised his loathing and he felt the smell of human being on a newspaper which another had read, while he could on others' furniture see human grease deposited on the polish, and he always opened the window when the maid had arranged the room. However, if he was traveling and necessity constrained, then he could shut off, as it were, all conduits from his organs of perceptions and harden himself against all disagreeable sensations.

When he had completed his studies at the University, in natural science, that least dependent of all sciences, because opinion plays a lesser roll than a collection of material, he received a place as assistant in the Royal Academy of Science.

He had applied for a situation here for the purpose of obtaining a view of the kingdoms of nature, collected and classified in one place, and if possible to read therein and discover the great connection if there was any, or the universal confusion which probably was there. His intentions soon became manifest, especially when he could no longer avoid the danger of their enticing from him, his project to classify the birds after an entirely different method than the current one. The professors, who of course did not want to be lowered to collectors of material for a young man, and were not willing to become obsolete with their works, took an instinctive aversion to the scrutinizer. The first obstacle to the intruder was made by placing him to detail work of a subordinate character which was disgusting to his sense of beauty, during six months he had to change alcohol in the fish collection; at first he was retching from the nauseating odor, but after he had overcome this disagreeable perception he turned furiously to the study of the fishes, and as he worked rapidly he had inside of the half year thoroughly studied the great material. He had been standing the whole winter in a cold, dirty and semi-dark kitchen where he had been smelling bad alcohol, frozen his hands and contracted a severe chronic cystitis.

Afterwards he was set to writing labels for the algæ. As he had received no instructions in calligraphy at the University and by nature he had a wreak, unsteady hand, all the labels were discarded and he gained the name of being useless.—He could not even write.—But in two months, during which time he attended a writing school, and in the evenings sat at home over writing book and copy, he acquired a beautiful and legible hand and at the same time gained a more complete knowledge of the algæ than he had before, while into the bargain he learned the inestimable art of penmanship. The professors who had thought he would reject such subordinate work soon saw what kind of grit he had and that he understood how to use all adversities for his benefit, increasing his knowledge while turning aside softly from the leash and warding off the blows.

His improved penmanship was to be a new source of humiliations, for he was now placed at copying office records and letters, sinking finally, as they believed, to an ordinary copyist's rôle. Without complaining he took the occupation and, at the same time learning foreign languages, he had the opportunity of glancing into the secrets of all these great men, which they thought would be worthless to him. Thus he saw the scientific questions of the period, debated through correspondence and he discovered the ways to the secret meetings of learned societies, gained knowledge about the subterranean passages to distinction, and the opportunities to make his investigations fruitful. Thus he was unassailable, and just as they believed they had crushed him he arose again.

It was owing to this double quality of nobleman and independent thinker, that he became isolated. His name did not sound scientific and his fine and modern way of dressing was taken as a proof of unscientific sense by those who remembered Berzelius' ragged pants; his patient and apparent submission was taken as inferiority, and all his meditations over science, as poetical effusions. Regretting to have let him come behind the curtain, and in order to press him down again they now placed him at another work which had been rejected by every newcomer, and was called the proving stone. There was in the garret a remnant collection of stones and minerals, which had come together partly through gifts and legacies and partly through circumnavigations and explorations, and as most of it had been discarded as duplicates, at a time when geology was in its infancy, increasing knowledge demanded that they again be overhauled and assorted. They were placed in an attic room beneath the rooftiles and lay in a big heap decidedly covered with dust and cobwebs. Borg who must now stand bent beneath the heated rooftiles and inhale the dust, was about to give it up, but when on the second day he found a new mineral which he suspected to be unknown, he at once applied himself to the work and started classifying. During this he made observations which shook his already faint belief in the whole system of the science, and he commenced seeing that the stones were not classified by nature but it was the brain that classified the phenomena. Besides, everything might be classified if one could only decide upon a basis of division, and he soon saw that the basis employed here was not the most rational one, the very foundation being an unsettled hypothesis; for instance, that the primitive rocks had been formed through melting by fire, contrasting with the stratified rocks which were positively regarded as deposited in water; but some of the primitive rocks were also stratified like the younger sedimentary formations; then he found that all of it was twisted and guessed at and the whole system founded on guess work. In the meanwhile he had analyzed his mineral and found that it was hitherto unknown, whereupon he gave it to the professor who sent it to the Berlin Academy and got his name attached to the new mineral. Borg received no thanks, no mention, only a few taunting words from the professor. Irritated thereby he undertook himself to describe the next mineral which he found to be new and sent it to Lyell; his paper was read in the Geological Society, of which he was made a member. Comrades and superiors pretended to be ignorant of his success, which was in a measure disparaging to the professor who had overlooked the unknown mineral, and now repugnance grew into hate which developed to persecution. But he turned aside, made himself invisible and worked. This collection of minerals being gathered from all countries in Europe, and as Borg understood how to give to each discovery a touch of direct usefulness for the science of mining in the respective countries, he succeeded in two years to gain membership in most of the learned societies of Europe, and was decorated with badges of the Italian Crown Order, the French "Instruction publique," the Austrian Leopold order and the Russian St. Annae order, second class. But nothing availed among his surroundings, and the laughter increased at each mark of distinction which was nevertheless merited. When they could not deny the facts, they underrated their value or pretended to be ignorant of what had happened, which, however, did not prevent them from using his trodden path in their own hunt.

When at last after seven years of tormenting service he inherited a legacy from his father, who had died, and he retired from service to travel abroad as a private man, he heard alternately that he had failed in his calling and that it was a pity that he did not become anything, or that he had been discharged from office. It was with boundless disdain for human beings that he left his country to continue his studies abroad. In hotels and pensions all over Europe he met many, kinds of people with whom he formed acquaintances which were soon broken by circumstances. But everywhere he saw how people of the same period expressed the same mind about the same things, pronounced the opinion of the majority as their own, spoke phrases in place of thoughts, and he discovered thereby that it really was the thoughts of a few spirits that were ruminated by the masses. Thus he found that all geologists spoke Agassiz' and Lyell's ideas from 1830 and '40, all religious free thinkers exhaled Renan and Strauss, all brisk politicians were living on Mill or Buckle, and all who spoke up-to-date literature cast up Taine. It was then only a few main batteries which had an annunciator and which could through the conducting wires from their talents set all the small bells tinkling. Through this he soon came to the domain of psychology, visited spiritualists, hypnotizers and mind readers, saw behind these swindles some new discoveries which would surely change humanity in its mode of living thoughtlessly as cattle, perhaps contribute towards adjusting the thought mechanism, and show that this whole battle about opinions is only a strife for the power to set other people's brains in motion, to force the masses to think as I. He had been a witness to scientific encounters which had resulted in a conquest for the wrong opinion, only because the victor had sufficient authority and was supported by a majority. He had seen political and religious combats and in a legislation directly contrary to sound reason and justice, founded on approved errors, which were inherited by succeeding generations as self-evident truths.

Yes, surely it concerned only how to make one's own will valid, and the whole driving power behind the vindication of opinions were interest and passion. Interest, it was nothing else than need, a need of food and love, and to gain these required a certain amount of power. Whoever did not strive for power was a weak one, whose desire of life was attenuated, therefore the weak was always heard to demand rights, the rights of the weak, while there was only a mathematical justice given, an arithmetical truth, for the calculating of which was required a strong mind capable of emancipating itself from the delusions of interest and passions. When he searched his inner self and compared himself with a great many others, he found that through a strict self-education he had freed his judgment to a high degree, and that in him was a specially developed thrift to seek abstract justice, that truth which consists in the actual conditions, the pith of fact, why he called himself a friend of truth in the highest sense, although not prompted thereby to tell all his thoughts abroad nor prevented from replying to importunate questions, when need be, with a prevarication.

In order to trace more closely the organization of the man-brute he designed a special study of the mental faculties of all the lower animals and thus guided himself up to man. He then made a ledger over all the individuals that came in his way, from relatives, nurses, maids, to schoolmates, university comrades, society friends and superiors, in one word all who came within the circle of his observation. This he completed through a collection of personalia, baptismal certificates, and the testimonies of their acquaintances; he wrote down their equation and tried a solution of the problem of their life. It was an incredible amount of working material. When he had straightened out the confusion he saw that the human beings could be divided just as the animals and plants into large classes, orders and families according to the basis chosen. By taking several bases he came pretty near to the truth and threw the fullest illumination upon the object of his observation.

Among other things he made a diagram of the human beings, with three subdivisions, conscious, self-deceivers and unconscious. The conscious or initiated stood highest, had discerned the deceit and believed in nothing and nobody, and were usually called skeptics, feared and hated by the self-deceivers, but recognized each other at once and usually parted with the word rascal, and reciprocal accusations of bad motives. As self-deceivers he counted all religious believers, hypnotic mediums, prophets, party chiefs, politicians, charity spirits, and the whole swarm of weak ambitious ones who pretend to live for others. To the unconscious belonged children, most criminals, most women and some idiots, all of whom still live on the semi-mammalian plane without the ability to distinguish between subject and object.

Proceeding from another basis, or by ontogenesis from the fœtus up to the highest standard of man, he got as the result, children, youths, women and men.

He also used to search among his countrymen for ancestral race marks, distinguished the central Swedes from the southern Swedes, could see the Norwegian in the Vermlanders and Bohus-landers, pointed out the Finn in some of the Norrlanders, kept record of immigrated Germans, Wallons, Shemites and gypsies, which often gave him the key to various traits in otherwise inexplicable characters.

He also had another basis for a division of characters according to the dominant, as he called it, and he got the nutritive as the lowest group including epicures, drunkards and the avaricious, the sexualic or licentious, the affective or sensitive, and the intellectual or thinkers who stood highest.

This science he developed to a high degree, and after some time acquired the ability to judge human beings and give their equations. To verify the truth of his observations he used himself as a psychological preparation, cut himself up bodily, experimented with himself and grafted fistulas and fontanelles, subjecting himself to unnatural and often repulsive spiritual diet, but carefully guarded faults of observation, and avoided forming a norm for others by his own sayings and doings.

When he had finally become weary of traveling abroad, and his soul was longing for its milieu, he returned home to seek a sphere of activity. As it was immaterial to him what his occupation might be he applied for the position of fish commissioner. As they were not anxious to have him too near he was appointed as the first man of the inlet to Stockholm.

Here he awoke from the review of his evolution, from which he used to regenerate himself by hastily living his life over again, thereby tracing, as it were, his standpoint and, calculating his resources, he cleared his course onward to his probable destiny and his prospects of succeeding in his enterprises.

The pilot, who in the meantime had rowed the boat behind the rocks and in lee of the ice cakes, had already decided that the Doctor, who was sitting with introverted, expressionless eyes, was a little freaky, took the occasion to ask if they should turn toward the harbor, whereto the commissioner nodded consent.

Once more he glanced at the magnificent panorama yonder, where the ice floes were driven onward, rent asunder, packed themselves, crowded together, pushed over each other, turned on edge, changed their horizontal position to big upheavals and tilting of the strata, forming mountains, dales and hills. It seemed to him as though he beheld the earth's crust being born, when on the incandescent sea the first hard cake was broken to pieces, driven forward, pushed on edge, piled in heaps to form the primitive mountains, skerries, rocks, islets, which were but enormous packs of ice, icebergs, although formed from another mineral than water. Over this repetition of the history of creation vibrated the primitive, undivided white light of the ice beside the deep blue of air and water, the first breaking of the darkness, and here the God of the saga of creation who separated light from darkness, came forth as a sensible explanation to his investigating mind. Once again the first attempt at harmonious sounds of the reptiles, now transformed into birds, rang out over the watery circle, the limitation of himself, which must be the center wherever he went....

The boat floated into harbor, the smoke was rising from the chimneys, it was dinner time.

[CHAPTER FOURTH]

One Sunday forenoon the fish commissioner sat at his open window; the early summer had just come, there was a light blue color on the water and a faint verdure in the crevices of the rocks, on the insignificant remains of lichens and mosses. The flocks of birds had gone north and only segregated pairs of eider ducks were swimming, two by two, in the coves. The great solitude, as he called the Baltic Sea, impressed him this day as he saw one vessel after another steering southward under foreign flags with lively colors, perhaps coming accidentally, perhaps regularly, all of these flags more luminous than the poor blue and tawny yellow which is so easily soiled. He saw the exciting tricolor on a brig which was lumber laden from Norrland, where it had recently been with wine and oranges and was now passing down to more sunny and populous coasts. The enfeebled dannebrog on a butter schooner lay in the wake of a great German mail steamer carrying white bunting with mourning border and the Crown mark like the ace of spades, above something of red color. England's blood red standard, the Spanish awning cloth, America's King cotton ticking, each of these was a greeting from so many foreign nations to which he felt more affianced than to those strangers whom he was condemned to call countrymen, for he had a right to carry all of these colors on his gala coat but not his own country's. And to-day, it seemed, these reminders of his cosmopolitan citizenship came to him more invigorating than usual, as during the last few days of his exile in this place he had been surrounded by a full and open enmity. He had recently undertaken to enforce a law adopted several years ago, though never applied, about a certain measure of the meshes in nets and seines, and had thereby encountered an opposition and open defiance which finally forced him to send for the sheriff who confiscated the nets. He had, however, first shown thoroughly how the interference of the government was only prompted by concern for the welfare of the people, he had held before them how they, while not wishing to divide a farm, preferring to have one son prosperous and the family maintainer, still contrived, by indiscriminate fishing, to make their children dependent of the almshouse for their support. All to no avail. All these measures and steps were regarded as the evil contrivance of a pack of idle officers who were salaried with the people's money, for the special purpose of tormenting them. He retorted in vain, that it was the farmers in the Reichstag who had voted this law, whereupon the fishermen turned their hate towards the farmers and government alike.

He observed that these fishing people really represent a remnant of the aboriginal community, careless and inconsiderate, without the peasant's forethought for the morrow and next year. They were like the savage who hunts two days and sleeps eight, and like the savage they possessed certain negative faculties to do without, and endure, but lacked the positive ability to improve their situation through investigation, having a decided and instinctive dislike for innovation, thereby betraying their inability to adapt themselves to a higher stage of culture. All these fishermen were bottom sediments of the country's population; when the battle over fertile river valleys and lake margins was going on they could not maintain their own, and fled or were pressed out to the headlands where the soil ceased and only the uncertain water left its winnings. Like gamblers they were as unreliable as fortune, unscrupulous in their dealings, drawing small advances beforehand from the ever expected great fishing, which a lucky shipwreck might bring them. Therefore their hate immediately kindled towards the new comer, and in their blindness they could not see how he would if from ambition only improve their condition and free them from labor. For instance, one duty of the head pilot was to make meteorological reports; for him he had constructed a self-regulating wind measure from cleft sardine boxes, which, however, was not accepted but placed in the garret. He had offered to assist in cases of sickness but had been rejected. He had offered to teach the wives how to prevent the stoves from smoking, by the application of a stromling barrel as a flue at the top of the chimney, but they had made grimaces at him and continued to lament over the irremediable smoke. He would teach a fisherman, who had tried to raise potatoes unsuccessfully, how to fertilize the sandy strand with seaweed and the refuse from fish, as he had seen the people on the coast of England do with marked success; all was in vain. When he saw how the surplus of the big stromling fishing of the spring lay decaying for lack of salt, he would teach them the Faroe-islanders' method of salting with the ashes of seaweed in case of necessity and for domestic use, this same preservative being always used by said islanders in the manufacture of cheese.

The result of all his endeavors to teach them useful things, was that he received the nickname of Doctor Know-all, was regarded as a fool, and became the laughing stock of the coffee gatherings, and drinking bouts. Even the children made faces as he passed by.

The incongruity between what he was, and what he was taken to be, impressed him at the beginning as comical, but afterwards when the hostilities succeeded the coldness he marked an unfavorable influence on his mental state. It was as though a thundercloud of unequal electricities hung over him, irritating his nerve current, trying to annihilate it through neutralization. He felt as though the thoughts directed towards him from these many would have the power to gradually drag him down, cramp his opinion of his own value, so that the moment would come when he could no longer rely upon himself and his mental superiority, and finally their views that he was the idiot and they the sound would grasp his brain and force him to agree with them.

Meanwhile as his thoughts wandered here and there a new object came within the forty-five degrees of the horizon, which he commanded at a glance from his window. A gunboat came to lee of the rock at half speed, clewed up its sails and dropped anchor. Through the marine glass he saw the sailors move about apparently in a hurly-burly, but without crowding; each one hurried to his belaying pin, his line, and his halyard, when the executive officer's whistle sounded. The vessel's straight sides, the extended stem where the iron plates seemed to sprawl asunder but combined their concentrated force In a forward direction, radiating out as it were at the bowsprit, the exhaust pipe and the smokestack's energetic smoking, the masts striving with stay and shroud, the round circle of the cannon's mouth, everything indicated an array of forces, regulated, curbing each other, reacting and cooperating, the contemplation of which put him into a harmonic state of mind. It was to him as though power and order streamed forth from the wedge-shaped iron hull, where purpose, limitation and measure, united into a unit of beauty, and conveyed a deeper enjoyment by reflection than a handsome work of art commonly affords the superficial observer by the way of feeling.

Something else came to him through reflecting on this little floating community surrounded by water. He felt strengthened, as though he had a support in this symbol of power, that was authorized by the people's assembly and the royal government, with the appliance of all the means of culture and science, and which protected the higher developed against the pressure of barbarism from beneath; he saw with satisfaction how a couple of the most knowing, who had been qualified by due examinations, guided with a whistle this hundred of half savages, who did not dare to pretend to understand, that which they did not understand. He had never been beguiled to commit the modern fault of observation of believing that the lower classes suffered from their subordinate position and coarse food. He knew well that they were precisely on the plane they should be, and that they suffered just as little from their station as the fishes beneath would suffer from not having been developed into amphibians, and as far as their coarse food was concerned he knew from experience when he had invited a few fishermen to dinner how they rejected all but that which filled the belly; yes, he had seen them select the poor rye in the bread basket, instead of the fine wheat. He had never believed in the talk about lack of food excepting when misfortune came and then only accidentally, for there existed state laws for the poor which are so often misused by sluggards and the shrewd, who feign sickness and force the community to support them. He had never adored the small, never needed to kneel to the insignificant, notwithstanding that he himself was cast out from the upper camp which during the common period of decay tricked itself up with stolen reputations and lay pressing down that which should grow. He did not even now let this induce him to overestimate this approximate picture of the upper stratum, which in the shape of a man-of-war inspired his admiration from a certain point of view, but on the other hand was a reminder of a system of state, which executed outrages on the minds with compressed gas and Bessemer cylinders.

Downstairs his host's door banged, and the tongues began to wag at the entrance of Oman, whose net had been confiscated. The gin glasses rang and the clamor rose at the repetition of yesterday's drunken spree.

"Idiots and destroyers of the people, who believe they know more than sensible fishermen and who lie on the sofa and read books, and get two thousand a year, snots, who would teach their father how to fish, a pack of thieves and cigarette heroes who go about with sow's tails under their noses...."

And now a wave broke against Vestman's elucidation of facts that he had gleaned on board the "Jacob Bagge" about the commissioner's extraction, his father's irregular sexual relations, his mother's low descent, and he alluded to the commissioner's discharge from his first office and so forth.

The listener tried to make himself deaf, and indifferent as usual, but the words cut him, soiled him, hurt him against his will. Old doubts about his father's integrity began to awaken, doubts of his own value were aroused and fears as to the possibility of keeping himself dry in this rain of mud, and to avoid a fight where he perhaps would fail from nicety in choice of weapons.

Now struck the bell on the man-of-war, a drum whir rolled, and the summer wind carried the tunes of a hymn from a hundred throats out over the water, solemn, rhythmically arranged, submissive, all while the clamor and threats from downstairs rumbled as from the cages in a menagerie, and in the psalm's ferment rose to a howl, for a quarrel had arisen between the parties, at the question of taking back the net by force.

The commissioner, who regarded churches as archaeological collections or interesting pagoda buildings from past times was reminded involuntarily of the utterance which a young clergyman let fall one night when at a discussion of the Christian cult.

"I do not believe in Christ's divinity and all that, but believe me, the mob must be scared!" "The mob must be scared," repeated he to himself silently, but dropped the thread immediately when he heard the fray break out downstairs. Chairs were knocked over, heels were braced and kicked against the furniture and roaring as from cattle was mixed with hissing as from reptiles while during all this a woman's voice sputtered and produced several hundred words a minute.

At this instant the steamer whistled, weighed anchor and hoisted sail, the smokestack sent a soot cloud toward the blue summer sky. It was with a feeling of regret and anxiety that he saw the steamer and its beautiful cannon disappear southward; he felt as though he had lost a support and as if the hate closed round him like a sack, he would flee, out, anywhere.

Now a child cried, if from fear or pain he could not hear, for under the tumult he had stolen down the staircase and reached the harbor, cast off his painter and rowed out from the land as quickly as he could.

The rock he was in quest of was the eastern-most of a little archipelago, which he had never paid attention to before, but now for the first time when in need to be alone, he sought it. A hater of strong body movements, which he found partly superfluous while there existed locomotion by machinery, and partly detrimental to his nerve and thought life for the fine tool which the brain capsule enclosed could just as little stand jars as the house where the astronomer's instruments of precision are kept. He had never learned how to row but his sense of time and his well-weighed motion centers made him at once a clever oarsman, and his studies of physics taught him how to improve the old invention so that by raising the seat he economized arm power.

As he now saw the skerries receding from the stern of his boat he began to breathe easier, and when he shortly landed on the first rock he was seized by an irrepressible feeling of happiness. It was a sunny, long, low islet whose strand rocks of gray gneiss formed a little harbor into which the boat sped. The water near the beach was transparent as condensed limpid air, and the soft color of the kelp shone at the bottom as though molten into a mass of glass. The stones on the beach lay washed, dried and polished, offering a variation in colors that never tired, for there were no two alike, while between them the velvet grass and sedges had sought hold for their tufts. Slowly the ledge rose upward and in depressions in the moss lay the mews' eggs, three by three, coffee brown with black spots, while their owners cried and cawed above his head. He climbed higher up to where a pile of stones had been laid up by marine surveyors, and were whitewashed by the gulls, mews and terns. A few juniper bushes spread out as carpets and beneath them a profusion of the white, subtle star flower had improvised its bed, a connection of Middle Europe's highlands and the shade of northern forests.

The little turnstone daring and gay fluttered uneasily around the disturber of the peace to mislead him from her nest.

Not a shrub, not a tree pointed over the half naked ledges, and this absence of shadows from coverts, gave the visitor a lighter and gayer mood. Everything was open, overlooked at once, sunlit on this ledge of rock, and the water which separated him from his lately left home among the savages, seemed to surround him with an insurmountable limit of pure transparency. The half arctic, half alpine landscape with its primeval formation refreshed and rested him. When he had become rested, he took the boat and rowed on further. He passed three polished rocks, resembling three petrified waves, naked as a hand, without a trace of organic life and which only aroused a scientific, geological interest concerning their origin; he grazed a flat rock of reddish gneiss; on its lee side stood a hundred years' mountain ash, solitary, moss bedecked, gnarled, and in its ragged trunk a white wagtail hatched its brood for lack of rooftile or stone wall. The little charming bird dove down among the strand stones and would make the foe believe that in no wise there existed a nest or gray white eggs there.

The solitary mountain ash stood on a grassy carpet of a few square feet and looked so lonely, but so unusually strong in lack of competition, and could better defy storm, salt water and cold than with jealous equals wrangling over earth crumbs. He felt attracted to the lonely veteran and longed, during a transitory moment, to raise a hut at its feet, but he passed on and the feeling blew away.

A dark cliff came to view behind the last point, it was coal black from the volcanic mineral diorite, and, as he approached it, he became depressed. The black crystallized mass seemed to have been cast up from the sea bottom, and after hardening had come into a terrible fight with water or a thundercloud and had cracked into eight parts, which had afterwards been carried away by the sea and ice or dragged down into the depth. Steep, perpendicular stood the black glittering wall out along the little harbor, and when the boat landed below it he felt as though he was down in a coal mine or a sooty blacksmith's shop. It depressed and awed him, he climbed up on the cliff, there rose as a landmark a pole with a white painted keg at the top. This trace of human beings out here where no people were to be seen, was a mixed reminder of gibbet, shipwreck, coal, a crude contrast between the unmixed colorless colors, black and white, of barren violent nature devoid of organic life, there being no lichens or moss on the whole body of the rock; further, this carpentry work without vegetable transition between primeval nature and human hand work, was irritating, disquieting and brutal. In the great Sunday stillness he heard beneath his feet, where stones had rattled down and formed a roof over a crevice, how the long breakers sucked in half way under the point, and pressed the air forward with muffled sound, then drew back again with a hissing and hollow sighing.

He stood a moment enjoying the oppression, while his thoughts wandered back to old memories which always brought him loathing. He smelt coal gas, saw manufactories, sooty, discontented people, heard machinery, city rumbling and human voices, which spoke words that would eat their way through his ears into his brain and sow seeds that would spring up as weeds smothering his own sowing; transforming the field he had cultivated with so much pains to a wild meadow like those of the others.

He climbed into his boat and turned his back on the gloomy sight; again he enjoyed the infinite purity of the waters, the empty blue which like an unwritten slate lay soothingly before him, for it did not raise any memories, develop any inspirations, or call forth any strong sensations. And now when he approached a larger island, he greeted it as a new acquaintance who should tell him something else and efface the recent impressions. New points and rocks were passed, each offering its surprise, its special physiognomy, often with such small differences that it required a sharply trained eye to see them. These small cliffs, which seemed so naked, so tiresomely alike when viewed from a passing boat, offered at nearer view the most changeable scenery, just as variance of the same coins only to the numismatist betray their secrets.

He now landed on a somewhat larger islet whose irregular jagged appearance had allured him, especially when he saw protruding over the tops of the rocks the crowns of trees with dense foliage. When he had climbed up on the northern point, the black base of which was polished smooth by the waves, he saw that the island was a cluster of at least four others, that seemed to have been drifted together by different winds, and by the congestion of different geological formations, forming a whole conglomerate of landscape pictures, brought from every zone. The northern part was composed of a cone of hornblende schist which, down on the strand, was cleft in enormous blocks that had fallen from the rocky wall, and was as yet unpolished by the water, while between these cubes grew strangely, as though allured by secret sympathy, an immense number of black currant shrubs, dusky in color and harmonizing in tone with the black sparkling stones. It was so unexpected to find these cultured deserters from the garden out here in the wilderness that it appeared as a joke of nature, perhaps laid in the bill of a wounded black-cock that had flown out here to die, carrying the seeds of dawning culture. Farther up in the rock pile stood a grove of deciduous trees with light verdure, but with cut tops and white trunks, as though whitewashed with lime by fostering human hand. He tried from a distance to guess their species, but they were so different from all others he had seen in this latitude that his thoughts revolved between acacias, beeches and Japan varnish trees, so common in southern Europe, and when he finally heard the well known rustle of the common aspen he would not believe his ears. He quickly shunned a viper, which ran down between two stones like a stream of water, and coming nearer, he saw that he had heard aright. It was the slender and trim aspen of the groves and pastures, that the northern wind, stony ground, drifting ice and salt water had pruned and trained to this unrecognizable variety, and which in the battle against tempest and cold had turned gray and lost its top, and therefore only consisted of frozen sprouts that were continually shooting out indefatigably renewing themselves, while the goats had peeled off the protecting bark and let the sap run out. There was eternal youth in those soft light green shoots on the gray whiskered branchless trunk, old age without maturity, an abnormality which was refreshing because it was new and transcended the banal.

When he had climbed up between the sharp stones and reached the height it was as if he had ascended a field in ten minutes. The region of deciduous trees lay below him, and upon the plateau appeared already the alpine flora, with the field form of the juniper, and close by the veritable northern cloud berry in the white moss of the moist crevices, and here and there the little civilized cornel, perhaps the only Swedish shrub on the seaboard. He slowly descended the southern slope, through cowberry and bearberry vines, hair grass, sedges, cotton grass and springy mosses, until suddenly he stood on a ravine, where the islet had cracked and formed a channel between the black rocky walls.

With wild shrieks the saucy auks flew up as he stepped on a natural stone bridge across the shallow channel, climbed another cliff of lighter formations, and reached a new section of this wonderful islet.

The light elegant eurite, in which faint rose-colored feldspar was mingled with a delicate blue-green quartz while mica was only betrayed through a glistening like microscopical hoar frost, gave the little landscape a gay aspect, and being cleft infinitely, it offered sofas and real armchairs at every step. A compact vein of granular white limestone passed as a belt straight through the rocky mass, and the fertile gravel from this which had crumbled from rain and frost, was amassed below between the rocky walls. And here a ravine began to present such an enchanting view that he stopped amazed and sat down on one of the stone stools to enjoy the surprising fairy scenery.

Before him, between the perpendicular walls whose bases disappeared in the soil, there unfolded a grassy carpet interwoven with endless flowers, choicer and more thrifty than those on the mainland. The blood red geranium had stepped from the rock and sought moisture down here, the honey white grass of Parnassus from the wet sedgy mead had here met with the forest's blue yellow lily of the valley, and the southern orchids, perhaps wind driven from the vineland Gotland, had fled here, the hyacinth like orchis-sambucina, the pompous orchis militaris, the stately cephalanthera, a kind of embellished lily of the valley, had sought their nursery here in the forcing lime and moist sea air between protecting walls in the most luxurious grass.

And far in the distance the walls of the cliffs were hidden by birch and alder trees, which rose modestly in the air without daring to raise their tops to the wind; self-sown here and there stood the cranberry trees in the midst of the grassy carpet, with their white snowballs hanging to the grapelike leaf; the dark green buckthorn leaned like an espalier against the precipice and its glossy leaves faintly reminded of the orange so famed in song, but were more juicy, more varied in color, finer in design and more delicate structure.

It was a park with the characteristics of the mainland floating out here, and when through a rent or depression in the rocks he saw a blue horizontal streak of the sea, the contrast in the wonderful scenery struck him.

After he had sat a moment and listened to the chaffinch's spring time song, which was interrupted by the gulls' and guillemots' caws and shrieks, and he felt the solitude enwrap him like a slumber, and when the birds for a moment were hushed and only the faint sea breeze rustled in the birch tops without reaching farther down, he heard unexpectedly a cough. He started and looked around but saw no trace of man.

The painful hollow sound from the chest of a human being in the midst of this quiet nature awoke him suddenly and brought a disagreeable feeling of loathing. Was it a lonely one like himself who sought rest, or a nest plunderer? In either case he would free himself from uneasiness, and find out who this was that disturbed him. Therefore he climbed the rocky wall on natural steps in the limestone dyke and he beheld now the third section of this polyp-like islet. Over a low stone wall, apparently to protect the blooming field from grazing cattle, he passed to a pine tree region on gneiss, walked under the branches, trampled knee deep in ferns which formed an underbrush beneath the pine trees and resembled dwarf palms but of fresher green and more elegant foliage, while at their feet were seen the blushing strawberries.

When he came up out of the ravine he saw a cove with rushes where some abandoned pole hooks were driven in the mud. He stopped to listen, and soon he heard a voice which came from the other side of the knoll. It rang high and soft as a child's and sank again so that he thought it was some young yachtsman who had ventured out here. But the words fell so passively, attractively, winningly, and invitingly, and he was surprised to hear a boy expressing himself in so careful language. The vocabulary was small and the language was that of ordinary conservation in cultured society, but without force or diversity of expression, and the objects spoken of were called by incorrect terms. The speaker talked about the verdure of the trees without naming them, called the mews gulls, the chaffinch a bird, gneiss granite and the bulrush a reed.

It might be a youth that insisted upon being heard and spoke so long without allowing himself to be interrupted by the slow mumbling voice of an old man, who every now and then muttered an objection or information. Now the youthful voice laughed, a laughter without cause, to judge from the conversation, a laughter to let the beautiful voice be heard or show a set of white teeth, a laughter without merriment, a succession of ringing sounds without other meaning than to jealously divert the attention from something real, which would come between. A signal, a bird call! There was no doubt, it was a young woman's voice.

He stepped unresistingly up onto the last knoll after having felt of his necktie and hat, and he now saw beneath him a picture, whose details ever after remained in his memory. On a little upland meadow, under a group of old white beam trees around a white linen damask tablecloth, in the center of which was a butter dish of Kolmord marble, surrounded by the contents of a lunch basket, sat an old lady with beautiful gray hair and a well fitting gown, and close beside her stood a fisherman in his shirt sleeves with a sandwich in his hand, while before him stood a young lady holding in her hand a glass of beer, which she with a merry curtesy and the ripples of a dying laughter on her lips, reached to the embarrassed boatman.

He was captivated at once by the young woman's looks, and although his reflection at once whispered that she coquetted with the churl, he felt an irresistible attraction in the dark olive complexion, the black eyes, and the stately figure. It certainly was not the first woman which had attracted him at once, but she belonged to that class of women which never failed to attract him to them. The solitude and absence of others was not the reason of the quick selection, because he felt exactly the same as when he sought a color for a necktie and after walking dejectedly from store to store without experiencing the pleasant feeling that the article sought after would give, he finally stopped before a show window where the right one was, and in the same moment felt free from pressure as he quietly said to himself, this is the one!

After having hesitated a moment whether to step forward and introduce himself, or turn back, he made a movement which betrayed him. The girl observed him first, her arms fell to her sides and she looked with the expression of a frightened child at the unexpected appearance, which at once gave the intruder courage to step forward and reassure the group with an explanation.

Raising his hat with a low bow he stepped up to them.

[CHAPTER FIFTH]

Half an hour later the commissioner sat in the little company's sailboat with his own dory in tow, he was already installed in the position of guide to the two ladies, who had for their health sought a resort for the summer on Fish Skerry and would consequently be his neighbors. The conversation ran agreeably between the three new acquaintances with a somewhat precipitate ardor to compete and show their readiness and best side which is called forth in all who meet for the first time. The one who made the least effort was the elderly lady, who had introduced herself as mother of the young beauty. She seemed to have reached a perfect harmony and resignation, worn off all corners and was living in her memories and semi-indifferently regarding what was going on around her, expecting nothing from others, prepared for everything that life could offer her of good or ill and charming with her even mild disposition.

An affinity had already arisen between the young man and the young woman, and she seemed to enjoy receiving, and he, who had so long waited to give, felt his powers growing now that the long-accumulated surplus had found an outlet. And he gave for half an hour with lavish hand from all he had stored of information that could be of interest to them who were unacquainted with the conditions which would surround them for awhile. He delineated all the resources of the skerry and its deficiencies, depicted the life very alluringly as it at this moment appeared to him to become, now when he was no longer alone. And the young woman, who had never seen the skerry, received her first actual impression of the same from his description. In imagination she saw the red cottage where she was going to live with her mother, so neat and cosy just as he wished that she would see it in order to feel at home and tarry there. While he spoke it seemed to him as though he received in return something good and strong, as though he heard new thoughts, new points of view spoken by her lips which stood half open, not as though to swallow what he reached her, but as though they spoke themselves, and when her two big, faithful eyes looked admiringly and surprisedly up to him he believed that all he said was true and felt with rising esteem for himself new powers awakened, and old ones growing in strength and tenacity. He felt so really thankful when the boat touched land, just as after having received benefices when in need, that he involuntarily thanked them heartily as he helped the ladies out of the boat and carried their heavy valises on shore.

The young girl returned the politeness with "not at all," but as though out of her treasures she had really given a trifle compared with what she had in reserve.

When the commissioner had escorted the ladies to their new home which turned out to be Oman's cottage, the young girl broke out into a flow of rapture, being still under the influence of Borg's enchanting description. The dilapidated house had something unusually picturesque in its exterior, for there was not a single straight line. Storms, salt water, frost and rain had destroyed every straight outline, and since the mortar had fallen from the chimney it looked like a big tufa. Still more agreeably surprising was the really homelike interior with its old-fashioned comfort. The two rooms were located one on each side of the hall, with a kitchen between them at the end; the best room was spacious, with dark brown paper, which from smoke and age had assumed a pleasing, quiet, even brown tone with which every color harmonized. The low ceiling, which left no vacant space to be peopled by fancies, showed the beams on which rested the attic floor. Two small windows, with panes about half a foot square discolored by age, allowed a view of the harbor and the sea, and the mass of light from outside was pleasantly subdued by the white lace curtains which protected against glances from outside without shutting out the daylight, and hung like light summer clouds down over balsam and geraniums in English faience mugs with Queen Victoria and Lord Nelson in yellow and green. The furniture comprising a big white folding table, a Gustavian bedstead on which were piled numerous eiderdown beds, a white painted wooden sofa, a clock of Mora make that struck the hours, a bureau of birch with its mirror frame veneered with the root of the alder, draped with a bridal veil and loaded with porcelain knickknacks. On the bureau stood a mounted parrot under a glass case, and on the wall hung colored lithographic pictures from the Old Testament, among which the two over the bed seemed to have been placed with questionable purpose, one representing Samson and Delilah in a very unveiled delineation, the other was Joseph and Potiphar's wife. In one corner was an open fireplace which occupied considerable space and would have been dreadful had not the black gap been covered by a white draw curtain.

It was homelike, idyllic and cleanly.

The other chamber was like the first, but had two beds and a commode; the floor was covered with a rag carpet which with its variegated colors formed an album of memories, from grandfather's jacket, grandmother's blouse, mother's cotton gown and father's pilot uniform. There were the red garters of the girls and the yellow gallows of the land-wehr boys, blue bathing suits of the summer guests, beaver and corduroy, cotton and baize, wool and crash, from all fashions and wardrobes, poor men's and rich men's.

In this room stood a big white cupboard with fancy paintings on the door panels, framed in ivy, wreaths painted with mosaic bronze, wonderful small landscapes with dark blue coves, banks of rushes and sailboats, trees of unknown species, from paradise or the carboniferous age, turbulent seas with waves straight as furrows in a potato field, a lighthouse like a column on a rocky ledge, everything as naïve as a child's simple comprehension of rich nature's infinite variety of shapes and colors, which only the highly trained eye can discern.

In all this old-fashioned simplicity lay the essential part of the cure for a tired brain, which would seek rest in the past. The worn movement of the watch would lay unwound awhile and let the spring be relieved of tension to regain its spent powers. The association with the lower classes which did not entice to battle for the morsel of power, but themselves involuntarily every day and hour reminded those of the upper class of their dearly earned position, would diminish the stimulus and quiet those desirous of power by the thought that there already existed passed by periods.

The commissioner had already prepared the minds of the visitors to see and know all this, and neither of the ladies tired of expressing their satisfaction with the new quarters and were so occupied by investigating the location that they did not observe that their guide had retreated to leave them undisturbed.

The commissioner sat at his window on this Sunday afternoon and watched the two ladies put things in order down in their cottage. When he followed with his eyes their soft, but irregular movements, it was to him as though he heard music. The same modulations that a series of harmonizing tones develop on the ear drum and communicate to the nerve system, the same mild vibrations were now produced through the eye, and rang through the white strings which stretched from the cranium shell out over the sounding board of the chest and transmitted the vibrations through the foundation of his soul. A feeling of general pleasure streamed through his being, when he saw these women's hands moving in waving lines, as they picked trifles from their trunks and laid them on the table and chairs, the rising and sinking of the hips and shoulders imperceptible to the untrained eye, but still so elastic. And when the young woman passed through the room, there arose no straight line, no corners or edges when she turned, no angles when she bent over.

He was perfectly captivated in regarding this, so that for a moment he did not notice the noise in the garret and the creaking of the stairs and the raising of latches.

He was deeply occupied regarding the young lady whose exterior seemed to him perfectly beautiful except in one point, which deficiency he would try and accustom his eyes not to see. Her chin was a few lines too big and indicated a lower jaw unnecessarily developed in one who had ceased to catch, hold and tear uncooked meat, and when he saw it in profile he could picture the coming witch physiognomy, when the time came that the old woman's teeth loosened, the lips sunk and formed an obtuse angle and the nose dropped down over the prominent chin. But he must overcome this reminder of a beast of prey, and he pursued her face with his glance and reshaped it in his fancy, forced his eyes when they were fixed upon her face to see it in its entirety.

Now he heard footsteps and shouts down on the hill, and in a wild rage Oman's wife appeared with a swarm of women, who were carrying in triumph the rescued net down to the beach.

He instantly felt his authority infringed on, and taking his hat went down to the surveyor to demand his help as he was in the Crown's service and in duty bound to assist him.

In the room sat the custom house man at the coffee table, and as usual, when Vestman was out fishing, he had his arm around the waist of his sister-in-law. At the entrance of the commissioner he dropped his hold and under influence of the fear of being discovered he showed a greater officiousness than he otherwise would have done. He put on his uniform cap and went out and in a hasty desire to be a just man he stormed against the women and caught hold of the net.

"Damned old women, don't you know it is penitentiary to break the Crown's lock and seal!"

The women answered in a chorus of imputations, which alluded to both the commissioner and surveyor, the principal ones being that they did not care and that the devil might take the Crown's lock and seal, and that both gentlemen were of such characters that they could be put in penitentiary at any time.

Whereupon the surveyor became enraged and cried to a subordinate to bring the sheriff.

At the word sheriff the people gathered, crawled out of every hole and corner like ants, when one scratches in an ant-hill.

The people seemed ready at once to take part with the women, threatening words were uttered. The commissioner found it time for him to interfere to avoid coming under a subordinate's protection. Therefore he went up to the crowd and asked what they wanted.

But he received no answer, and turning to the women he spoke to them in a polite but stern manner, saying:

"As I before informed you, the Reichstag or your own elected representatives decided for the sake of your children and descendants that the fishing must be protected through prohibiting the use of such implements as spoil it without bringing you any advantage, and when you have had three years to wear out your old nets, but are still making new ones against the law, I have in the name of the Crown been forced to confiscate the unlawful implements. Nevertheless and in spite of the statute law you have broken the Crown's lock and seal, which can be punished with penitentiary. Still I will use clemency instead of justice if you comply and obey, therefore I ask you for the last time, if you will willingly give back the nets."

To this the women answered with new shriek and a new shower of epithets.

"Well," finished the commissioner, "as I am not a policeman, and you are the multitude, I beg the custom house surveyor to send for the sheriff and his assistants and at the same time I will solicit an order from the provincial governor to arrest Oman's wife."

As he spoke the last word, he felt two soft, warm hands grasp his right hand, and two big childish eyes looked into his, while a falling voice like that of a mother who begged for the life of her child, said:

"In the name of Heaven have compassion on a poor unhappy woman and don't do her any ill;" it was the supplication of the young girl who had at the beginning of the scene come out of the cottage.

The commissioner would free himself and turned away from the big eyes, whose glance he could not endure, but he felt his hand clasped harder and finally pressed against a soft bosom, heard words in melting tones, and, completely vanquished, he whispered to the beauty, "Let me go and I will drop the whole affair."

The girl loosened her hold, and the commissioner who made his plan in half a minute caught the surveyor by his arm and led him up to the custom house cottage, just as though he would give him some orders. When they reached the door, the commissioner said shortly and decisively as though he had come to a new conclusion.

"I shall communicate with the provincial governor myself in writing. However, I thank you for your assistance."