brightness to the wife, because it is herself who trims the wick and
adjusts the reflectors which send its light abroad.

I have again anticipated, because the subsequent career of Jonas Lie
could not be properly understood without a full appreciation of the new
factor which from this time enters into it. He developed signal ability
as a lawyer during the years of his practice at Kongsvinger; became
prosperous and influential, bought a considerable estate (called
Sigridnaes) and began to dabble in politics. He still wrote occasional
poems, and was the soul of all conviviality in the town. He entertained
celebrities, wrote political leaders in the papers, earned a great deal
of money, lived high, and unfolded a restless and widely ramified
activity. Then came the great financial crisis of 1867-68, which swept
away so many great fortunes in Norway. Lie became involved (chiefly by
endorsement of commercial paper) to the extent of several hundred
thousand dollars. He gave up everything he had, and moved to
Christiania, resolved to pay the enormous debt, for which he had
incurred legal responsibility, to the last farthing. Quixotic as it may
seem, it was his intention to accomplish this by novel-writing. And to
his honor be it said that for a long series of years he kept sending
every penny he could spare, above the barest necessities, to his
creditors, refusing to avail himself of the bankruptcy law and accept a
compromise. But it was a bottomless pit into which he was throwing his
hard-earned pennies, and in the end he had to yield to the persuasions
of his family and abandon the hopeless enterprise.

In Christiania he spent some hard and penurious years, trying to make a
livelihood as a journalist and man of letters. Some of his friends
suspected that the Lie family were subsisting on very short rations; but
they were proud, and there was no way to help them. The ex-lawyer
developed ultra-democratic sympathies, and time and again his Thomasine
led the dance at the balls of the Laborers' Union with Mr. Eilert
Sundt.[14] A position as teacher of Norwegian in Heltberg's Gymnasium he
lost because he only made orations to his pupils, but taught them no
rhetoric. His volume of "Poems" (1867) had attracted no particular
attention; but his political articles were much read and discussed.
However, it was not in politics that he was to win his laurels.

[14] A well-known Norwegian philanthropist, whose work on the
Gypsie