thfully, as a friend that waited his return.
He is stronger now, but no less delicate; he loves not Nature less,
but the world more. He has learned to love his fellow-men.
Knut Pedersen, vagabond, wanders about the country with his
tramp-companions, Grindhusen, the painter who can ditch and delve at a
pinch, or Falkenberg, farm-labourer in harvest-time, and piano-tuner
where pianos are. Here is brave comradeship, the sharing of
adventures, the ready wit of jovial vagrants. The book is a harmless
picaresque, a _geste_ of innocent rogue-errantry; its place is with
_Lavengro_ and _The Cloister and the Hearth_, in that ancient, endless
order of tales which link up age with age and land with land in the
unaltering, unfrontiered fellowship of the road that kept the spirit
of poetry alive through the Dark Ages.

The vagabond from Nordland has his own adventures, his _bonnes
fortunes_. There is a touch of Sterne about the book; not
the exaggerated super-Sterne of Tristram Shandy, with
eighteenth-century-futurist blanks and marbled pages, but the fluent,
casual, follow-your-fancy Sterne of the _Sentimental Journey_. Yet
the vagabond himself is unobtrusive, ready to step back and be a
chronicler the moment other figures enter into constellation. He moves
among youth, himself no longer young, and among gentlefolk, as one
making no claim to equal rank.

Both these features are accentuated further in the story of the
Wanderer with the Mute. It is a continuation of _Under Hoeststjaernen_,
and forms the culmination, the acquiescent close, of the
self-expressional series that began with _Sult_. The discords of
tortured loveliness are now resolved into an ultimate harmony of
comely resignation and rich content. "A Wanderer may come to fifty
years; he plays more softly then. Plays with muted strings." This is
the keynote of the book. The Wanderer is no longer young; it is for
youth to make the stories old men tell. Tragedy is reserved for those
of high estate; a wanderer in corduroy, "such as labourers wear here
in the south," can tell the story of his chatelaine and her lovers
with the self-repression of a humbler Henry Esmond, winning nothing
for himself even at the last, yet feeling he is still in Nature's
debt.

Hamsun's next work is _Den Siste Gloede_ (literally "The Last Joy").
The title as it stands is expressive. The substantive is "joy"--but
it is so qualified by the preceding "last," a word of overwhelming
influence in any