south-east shore of the country.

It may be roughly said that Skien, in the Danish days, was a sort of
Poole or Dartmouth, existing solely for purposes of marine merchandise,
and depending for prosperity, and life itself, on the sea. Much of a
wire-drawn ingenuity has been conjectured about the probable strains
of heredity which met in Ibsen. It is not necessary to do more than
to recognize the slight but obstinate exoticism, which kept all his
forbears more or less foreigners still in their Norwegian home; and to
insist on the mixture of adventurousness and plain common sense which
marked their movements by sea and shore. The stock was intensely
provincial, intensely unambitious; it would be difficult to find
anywhere a specimen of the lower middle class more consistent than the
Ibsens had been in preserving their respectable dead level. Even in that
inability to resist the call of the sea, generation after generation,
if there was a little of the dare-devil there was still more of the
conventional citizen. It is, in fact, a vain attempt to detect elements
of his ancestors in the extremely startling and unprecedented son who
was born to Knud and Marichen Ibsen two years and three months after
their marriage.

This son, who was baptized Henrik Johan, although he never used the
second name, was born in a large edifice known as the Stockmann House,
in the centre of the town of Skien, on March 20, The house stood on one
side of a large, open square; the town pillory was at the right of and
the mad-house, the lock-up and other amiable urban institutions to the
left; in front was Latin school and the grammar school, while the church
occupied the middle of the square. Over this stern prospect the tourist
can no longer sentimentalize, for the whole of this part of Skien
was burned down in 1886, to the poet's unbridled satisfaction. "The
inhabitants of Skien," he said with grim humor, "were quite unworthy to
possess my birthplace."

He declared that the harsh elements of landscape, mentioned above, were
those which earliest captivated his infant attention, and he added that
the square space, with the church in the midst of it, was filled all day
long with the dull and droning sound of many waterfalls, while from dawn
to dusk this drone of waters was constantly cut through by a sound that
was like the sharp screaming and moaning of women. This was caused by
hundreds of saws at work beside the waterfalls, taking advantage of th