e parlor floor
and his daughter to boarding-school. So absorbed is he in his work that
he can talk and think of nothing else. He neglects the social forms from
sheer abstraction and becomes almost a boor, because all the world
outside of his book pales into insignificance, and all persons and
events are merely interesting in so far as they can stimulate inquiry or
furnish information bearing upon the immortal opus. The inevitable
consequence follows. The professor alienates all who come in contact
with him. He is on the point of losing the affection of his wife, and
his daughter comes near going astray for want of paternal supervision.
Both these calamities are, however, averted, though in an arbitrary and
highly eccentric manner. The professor's eyes are opened to the error of
his ways, he does penance, and the curtain falls upon a reunited family.

[10] July, 1894.

The unpretentious little story "Dust" (_Stoev_, 1882) undertakes to
demonstrate the unwholesomeness of the religious ideas regarding the
life to come usually impressed upon children by parents and teachers. By
dust Bjoernson means all obsolete, lifeless matter in the world of
thought which settles upon, and often impairs, the vitality of the
living growth, or even chokes it outright. "When children are taught
that the life here is nothing compared to the life to come--that to be
visible is nothing compared to being invisible--that to be a man is
nothing compared to being an angel--that to be alive is nothing compared
to being dead--then that is not the way to give them the right view of
life; not the way to teach them to love life; not the way to inspire
them with courage, energy, and patriotism."

In his novel "Flags in City and Harbor" (1884), the English translation
of which is entitled "The Heritage of the Kurts," Bjoernson has attacked
a tremendous problem. He has attempted to illustrate the force of
heredity, and the exact extent to which it may be modified by
environment--to what extent an unfavorable heredity may be counteracted
by a favorable environment. The family of Kurt, whose history is here
traced through five generations, inherits a temperament which would have
secured its survival and raised it to distinction in barbaric ages, but
which will as surely, unless powerfully modified, necessitate its
extinction in the present age. For the Kurts are incapable of
assimilating civilization. An excess of physical vigor in the first Kurt
who