ly, only
with forced attention. What he saw clearly, entranced by the vision, was
the future--the free future. He had been touched by the wan wizard of
Olive Schreiner's Dream of Wild Bees, and "the ideal was real to him."
The things about him, other people's realities, were shadows--oppressive
shadows, indeed, but they did not concern him deeply. It was the great
currents of life he saw as real things, and among all the confusion of
world-movements he could trace the shining stream that ran towards
liberty; and with his hectic face and burning eyes he followed it, torn
by the cough and parched by the fever.

The Hansteens are a well-known family in Norway, clever and often
eccentric, Kristofer's aunt, Aosta Hansteen, at the time of my visit an
old lady over eighty, having fought many a battle for the equality of
woman both in Norway and America. Artist, linguist, and literary woman
of marked ability, but, after the manner of her cotemporaries, rather
outlandish and even outrageous in her attacks on masculine prerogative,
she is a target for satirists and wits, few of whom, however, approach
her virility of intellect. Her father, Kristofer's grandfather, was an
astronomer and mathematician. In his youth Kristofer had gone afoot
through the "dals" of Norway, and when he took me through the art
galleries of Kristiania he was a most interesting guide, through his
actual acquaintance with the scenes and the characters of the dalesmen
depicted. He knew the lights upon the snow and rocks, just what time of
the year shone on the leaves, where the wood-paths wound, the dim
glories of the mist upon the fjords, the mountain stairways in their
craggy walls, and the veiled colors of the summer midnight. And he knew
the development of Norwegian art life and literary life, as one who
wanders always in those paths, mysteriously lit.

Our hours of fraternization were few but memorable. He was a frequent
visitor at the house of Olav Kringen, the editor of the daily Social
Democrat, a big, kindly Norseman, who had remembered me from America,
and who had defended me in his paper against the ridiculous charge in
the ordinary press that I had come there to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm.
Through the efforts of Hansteen and the kindliness and largemindedness
of Kringen and his Socialistic comrades, I spoke before the Socialistic
League of Youth in their hall in Kristiania. The hall was crowded, over
eight hundred being present, and there was so