hantasmagoria of the grotesquest imaginings. The same
Jonas Lie who comports himself so properly in the parlor is quite
capable, it appears, of joining nocturnally the witches' dance at the
Brocken and cutting up the wildest antics under the pale glimpses of the
moon.

Throughout his boyhood he struggled rather ineffectually against his
Hyde, who made him kill roosters, buy cakes on credit, go on forbidden
expeditions by land and sea, and shamefully neglect his lessons.
Accordingly, he made an early acquaintance with the rod, and was
regarded as well-nigh incorrigible. He accepted with boyish stoicism the
castigations which fell pretty regularly to his lot, bore no one any
grudge for them, but rarely thought of mending his ways, in order to
avoid them. They were somehow part of the established order of things
which it was useless to criticise. In his reminiscences from his early
years, which he published some years ago, he is so delightfully boy,
that no one who has any recollection of that barbaric period in his own
life can withhold his sympathy. The following, for instance, seems to me
charming:

"I can still feel how she (Kvaen Marja, the maid) pulled us, cowering
and reluctant, out of our warm beds, where we lay snug like birds in
their nests, between the reindeer skin and the sheepskin covering. I
remember how I stood asleep and tottering on the floor, until I got a
shower of cold water from the bathing-sponge over my back and became
wide awake. Then to jump into our clothes! And now for the lessons! It
was a problem how to get a peep at them during the scant quarter hour,
while the breakfast was being devoured down in the dining-room with
mother, who sat and poured out tea before the big astral lamp, while
darkness and snow-drift lay black upon the window-panes. Then up and
away!...

"There (in the school) I sat and perspired in the sultry heat of the
stove, and with a studiously unconcerned face watched with strained
anxiety every expression and gesture of the teacher. Was he in
good-humor to-day? Would that I might escape reciting! He began at the
top.... That was a perfect millstone lifted from my breast, though, as
yet, nothing could be sure. Now for a surreptitious peep at the end of
the lesson."

It was Jonas Lie's ambition at that time to become a gunsmith. He had a
profound respect for the ingenuity and skill required for such a curious
bit of mechanism. But his father, who could not afford to have a