te idea of his
work. I know he was the author of a little pamphlet, "Det frie samfund"
(Free Society), and that he had translated and published one of
Krapotkin's works (whether "The State" or "The Conquest of Bread," I do
not now remember), which he had issued in a series of instalments,
intended ultimately to be bound together. As I recall the deep
earnestness of his face in speaking of the difficulties he had had in
getting it out, and the unsolved difficulties still facing its
completion, I find myself wanting to pray that he saw that precious
labor finished. It was so much to him. And I prophecy that the time will
come when young Norwegians will treasure up those sacrificial fragments
as dearer than any richer and fuller literature. They are the heart's
blood of a dying man--the harbinger of the anarchistic movement in
Norway.

I cannot say good-bye to him forever without a word concerning his
personal existence, as incomprehensible to the practical as his social
dreams perhaps. He had strong love of home and children; and once he
said, the tone touched with melancholy: "It used to pain me to think
that I should die and have no son; but now I am contented that I have no
son." One knew it was the wrenching cough that made him "contented." A
practical man would have rejoiced to be guiltless of transmitting the
inheritance, but one could see the dreamer grieved. His eyes would grow
humid looking at his little daughters; and indeed they were bright,
beautiful children, though not like him. In his early wanderings he had
met and loved a simple peasant woman, unlettered, but with sound and
serviceable common sense, and with the beauty of perfect honesty shining
in her big Norse-blue eyes. It was then and it is now a wonder to me how
in that mystical brain of his, replete with abstractions,
generalizations, idealizations, he placed his love for wife and
children; strong and tender as it was, one could appreciate at once that
he had no sense of the burden of practical life which his wife seemed to
have taken up as naturally hers. The whole world of the imagination
wherein he so constantly moved seemed entirely without her ken, yet this
did not seem to trouble either. Nor did the fact that his unworldliness
doubled her portion of responsibility seem to cause him to reflect that
she was kept too busy, like Martha of old, to "choose that good part"
which he had chosen. Thinking of it now, still with some sense of
puzzlement,