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THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATOR
53

that one cannot by any signs whatsoever divine their thoughts. Furthermore, I had found that when they talk, they express themselves with such concentration and by means of images of such poetic coloring that they give you the impression of refined thinkers. On these two grounds I thought it safe to assure Strindberg that the great, mystic silence of the Indians could not be due to inactivity of the brain. This seemed to please him, although I am not certain that he was fully convinced.

I told him also of a success he had had out there in unliterary U. S. A. Popular among the Swedes he was not, of course, since they are all church-people as a rule, church-goers of the most narrow-minded kind—and as such void of all understanding of every kind of critique of the existing order of things. After having read Strindberg's The Red Room, the majority of those whom I met had received the impression that Strindberg was a dangerous anarchist, and they had made up their minds not to read another line from his pen. Even the Swedish-American Singing Societies, which toured Sweden a year or two before Strindberg's death, disowned him and refused to give a red cent to the national fund which was started at that time in order that the officially disowned poet might be given a Nobel-Prize by the Swedish people.

All the more wonderful it is, therefore, that one of Strindberg's works that was least popular at home, The Swedish People at Home, had scored a great success that very year among the exiles in America. It was the founder and former editor of the weekly paper called