member
of his family descend into the rank of artisans, promptly strangled
that ambition. Then the sea, which has been "the Norseman's path to
praise and power," no less than the Dane's, lured the adventurous lad;
and his parent, who had no exalted expectations regarding him, gave his
consent to his entering the Naval Academy at Fredericksvaern. But here
he was rejected on account of near-sightedness. Nothing remained, then,
but to resume the odious books and prepare to enter the University. But
to a boy whose heroes were the two master-thieves, Ola Hoeiland and Gjest
Baardsen, that must have been a terribly arduous necessity. However, he
submitted with bad grace, and was enrolled as a pupil at the gymnasium
in Bergen. Here his Finnish Hyde promptly got him into trouble. Having
by sheer ill luck been cheated of his chances of a heroic career, he
began to imagine in detail the potentialities of greatness for the loss
of which Fate owed him reparation. And so absorbed did he become in this
game of fancy, and so enamored was he of his own imaginary deeds, that
he lost sight of the fact that they were of the stuff that dreams are
made of. With frank and innocent trustfulness he told them to his
friends, both young and old, and soon earned a reputation as a most
unblushing liar. But if any one dared call him that to his face, he had
to reckon with an awe-inspiring pair of fists which were wielded with
equal precision and force. The youth, being at variance with the world,
lived in a state of intermittent warfare, and he gave and received
valiant blows, upon which he yet looks back with satisfaction.

In spite of his distaste for books Jonas Lie managed, when he was
eighteen years old, to pass the entrance examination to the University.
Among his schoolmates during his last year of preparation at Heltberg's
Gymnasium, in Christiania, were Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson and Henrik Ibsen.
The former took a great interest in the odd, _naive_, near-sighted
Nordlander who walked his own ways, thought his own thoughts, and
accepted ridicule with crushing indifference.

"I was going about there in Christiania," he says in a published letter
to Bjoernson, "as a young student, undeveloped, dim, and unclear--a kind
of poetic visionary, a Nordland twilight nature--which after a fashion
espied what was abroad in the age, but indistinctly in the dusk, as
through a water telescope--when I met a young, clear, full-born force,
pregnant with the n