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of the nation, and it is therefore among them that the new commonwealth must be founded.

Besides, he was skeptical about all these social theories, and those which he himself had only lately enunciated, he had already torn to pieces. In one question, however, he showed a lively interest, and that was the dreadful possibility hinted at by Henry George, viz., that modern civilization was face to face with a decline, and that once more we had to expect the mediaeval Fimbul-winter.^[1]

While Strindberg told of all this, the latest and the very latest,—that which in the very course of speaking he added as a conclusion to the preceding—he truly lived over again, as it were, a thousand lives. He became Master Olof once more, but a Master Olof who had abandoned the church where there was no longer any work to do, and who had devoted himself to a more general betterment of the world, a utilitarian, as he then styled himself.

All the time while talking he smoked cigarettes. He inhaled the smoke with the same passionate delight that he hurled forth a few paradoxes with which he hoped to catch me. But when I cleared the reefs on which he hoped to test me it did not seem to disappoint him but rather to cause him satisfaction.

At times when he had launched some crushing argument or just caught the idea of one, he would suddenly stop and perform a cigarette smoker's tour d'adresse