ation's new day, the blue steel-flash of
determination in his eyes and the happily found national
form--pugnacious to the very point of his pen. I gazed and stared,
fascinated, and took this new thing aboard along the whole gunwale.
Here, I felt, were definite forms, no mere dusk and fantastic
haze--something to fashion into poetry.... From the first hour you knew
how to look straight into this strange twilight of mine, and you espied
flashes of the aurora there when no one else did, like the true and
faithful friend you are. You helped and guided and found grains of
gold, where others saw mostly nonsense, and perhaps half a screw loose.
While I was straying in search of the spiritual tinsel, with which the
_esprits forts_ of the age were glittering, you taught me, and impressed
upon me, again and again, that I had to seek in myself for whatever I
might possess of sentiment and simplicity--and that it was out of this I
would have to build my fiction."

This bit of confession is extremely significant. The Finnish Hyde was
evidently yet uppermost. Bjoernson taught Lie to distrust the tinsel
glitter of mere rhetoric, and the fantastic exuberance of invention in
which the young Nordlander believed that he had his _forte_. But the
matter had even a more serious phase than this. It was about this time
that Lie disappeared for a period of three months from his friends, and
even his parents, and when again he emerged into the daylight, he could
give no account of himself. He had simply sauntered about, moping and
dreaming. He had been Hyde. The cold shudders which lurked in his blood
from the long, legend-haunted arctic night could break into open terror
on unforeseen occasions. Grown man though he was, he was afraid of being
alone in the dark--a peculiarity which once got him into a comical
predicament.

It was his habit when travelling to place his big top-boots at night
within easy reach, so that he might use them as weapons against any
ghost or suspicious-looking object that might be stirring in the gloom.
One evening when he had gone to bed at a country inn, he was aroused
from his sleep and saw indistinctly a white phenomenon fluttering to and
fro along the opposite wall. Instantly he grabs a boot and hurls it with
ferocious force at the goblin. A roar was heard followed by a salvo of
blue profanity. It was a fellow-traveller--a lumber-dealer--who was to
occupy the other bed in the room. He had undressed and was disporti