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still whiter sky, with a big, red “Ruskprick” penetrating through both.

In his introduction to Life Among the Skerries Strindberg endeavors in his amiable, naïve manner to exculpate himself from his own charges in this matter. He declares that it is the bright, smiling element in the life of a man who dwells among the skerries—when it actually takes that form—which he desired to depict in The Inhabitants of Hemsö. In Life Among the Skerries he had endeavored to give the penumbra, and in order to be able fully to excuse himself, he finally half promised to give “possibly later on and under better auspices, the umbra which must exist in order to present the picture in its completeness.”

But he never gave us this complete picture with the bluish-black umbra. Things never became so cheerful about him as to permit him to write that work. I believe, besides, that he was too much concerned in the matter himself and that he loved the smiling idyl of the skerries too intensely to deepen it into tragic greatness.

For the inhabitants of central Sweden, The Inhabitants of Hemsö came as a harbinger of joy, but for us, the dwellers on the west coast who have learned how to love the strikingly wild which our coast has to offer, much more than the inland lake idyls of the Baltic coast, to us Strindberg's idyl of the skerries was altogether too tame, and shared too much of the nature of Japanese water-colors. This is the reason why at my first meeting with Strindberg, which is now to be related, I made an attempt to convert him, i.e. to get him to relinquish his hold on