There are some who see exclusively _das Dämonische_ in Strindberg, and who picture him as perpetually skirting precipices of moral and intellectual negation, or as a Lucifer who never emerges from consuming tongues of fire. They have nothing to say of such books as his _Sketches of Flowers and Animals_ (1888). Here we meet him, a mild and patient gardener, sowing his salad and spinach, revelling in the reward which his cool cucumbers offer after having been carefully tended by loving hands. Here he initiates us into his cult of the flower, his adoration of colour and form in the plant world; he anticipates Maeterlinck in his sensitive studies of the intelligence of flowers and the mysteries of seeds. His _Fables_ are stories of birds, insects and bushes, betraying an intimate knowledge of nature, and sparkling with a good-humoured satire. In these books there are strokes of brilliant imagination, there is a womanly tenderness for the lives of plant-children. In one of his stories[4] he tells us of a tall fir that can feel and suffer, and his description of the spirit within the tree which sobs under the wood-cutter's axe, and which some day we shall recognise, reminds us of Fiona Macleod's _Cathal of the Woods_. Strindberg's love of Nature had many qualities in common with Thoreau--there is the same pleasure in cultivating the cabbage-patch, the same ecstatic contemplation of green life. Thoreau could find his way in the wood during the night by the touch of his feet. Strindberg, treading his way through the forest in the dark hours, knows whether he walks on soil, clubmoss or maidenhair, "through the nerves, of his large toe."[5] There is also a practical, homely side of Strindberg, which is generally ignored, qualities appertaining to the small farmer with a keen eye to profitable cultivation of the land. Without these qualities he could not have written _Among French Peasants_ (1889), which is a series of articles on the life and conditions in agricultural France. They are the product of the mind of a true son of the soil, equipped with a journalist's power of rapid generalisation. Strindberg travelled through France, notebook in hand, stayed amongst the peasants, measured hay and corn, attended weddings and fairs, annotating the prices of meat and butter, studied the ravages of the phylloxera and geological formations. The book is crammed with facts and comparative statistics of town and country, wheat and wine, village education, libraries, labourers' wages, cheese-making, the best fertilisers, and other matters of import to rural economy.