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near Berlin about two years after I had met him in Gothenburg, it was not the poet Strindberg that received me, but rather the man of scientific research.

He had spent a couple of very unpleasant years in the vicinity of Stockholm. His large book about Sweden's Natural Sceneries he had not finished. He had had to go through the long painful proceedings of divorce from his first wife. He had passed most of his time in the skerries, had written some of his short, masterly one-act plays, he had painted a large number of pictures—so many that he might have arranged a separate exhibition— and he had described his first conjugal inferno in A Fool's Confession.

These two years of suffering and poverty played an important part in Strindberg's life. Doubtless they laid the foundation for that state of excessive irritability which paved the way for the great Inferno-period a few years later. If these years had not been so hard, Strindberg's career after 1892 might have become entirely different from what it was.

When Strindberg went into exile this time, he thought it was for the last time. During the voyage from Stockholm to Stettin, the steamer was followed by a huge dark-blue tidal wave, which he later on reproduced in colors, and this indefatigable pursuer he regarded as an omen that he must keep away from his ungrateful countrymen.

When I first met him in Friedrichshagen, he had the appearance of a man who finally could breathe again after a long confinement in a hospital.