quarters; all seed must be in the earth by
then. He knew what was needful.

A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without
respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point the future, a man from
the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred
years old, and, withal, a man of the day.

Nay, there was nothing left to him now of the copper mine and its
riches--the money had vanished into air. And who had anything left of
all that wealth when the working stopped, and the hills lay dead and
deserted? But the _Almenning_ was there still, and ten new holdings on
that land, beckoning a hundred more.

Nothing growing there? All things growing there; men and beasts and
fruit of the soil. Isak sowing his corn. The evening sunlight falls on
the corn that flashes out in an arc from his hand, and falls like a
dropping of gold to the ground. Here comes Sivert to the harrowing;
after that the roller, and then the harrow again. Forest and field
look on. All is majesty and power--a sequence and purpose of things.

_Kling_ ... _eling_ ... say the cow bells far up on the hillside,
coming nearer and nearer; the cattle are coming home for the night.
Fifteen head of them, and five-and-forty sheep and goats besides;
threescore in all. There go the women out with their milk-pails,
carried on yokes from the shoulder: Leopoldine, Jensine, and little
Rebecca. All three barefooted. The Margravine, Inger herself, is not
with them; she is indoors preparing the meal. Tall and stately, as she
moves about her house, a Vestal tending the fire of a kitchen stove.
Inger has made her stormy voyage, 'tis true, has lived in a city a
while, but now she is home; the world is wide, swarming with tiny
specks--Inger has been one of them. All but nothing in all humanity,
only one speck.

Then comes the evening.

Knut Hamsun

_by_

W.W. Worster

Knut Hamsun [Footnote: December, 1920.]

By W.W. Worster

Knut Hamsun is now sixty. For years past he has been regarded as the
greatest of living Norwegian writers, but he is still little known in
England. One or two attempts have been made previously to introduce
Hamsun's work into this country, but it was not until this year, with
the publication of _Growth of the Soil_, that he achieved any real
success, or became at all generally known, among English readers.

_Growth of the Soil_ (Markens Groede) is Hamsun's latest work. Its
reception here was one