But sometimes the joy of literary creation gave way to profound self-disgust. "What an occupation," he writes in _The Quarantine Master's Tales_,[11] "to sit and flay one's fellow-humans, offer the skins for sale, and expect people to buy them. It is like the famished hunter who cuts off his dog's tail, eats the meat himself, and gives the bones to the dog, the dog's own bones. To go about spying out people's secrets, exposing the birthmark of one's best friend, using one's wife as a vivisection rabbit, storming like a Croat, cutting down, violating, burning and selling. The devil take it all." [Illustration: Harriet Bosse, Strindberg's third wife as Biskra in _Samum_ 1902.] [Illustration: Anne-Marie Bosse-Strindberg, Strindberg's only child in his third marriage. Born 1902.] Strindberg's style expands to fit his wild excursions into the world of ideas and his eccentricities of conception, such as the story of when he tried to catch dead "souls" with a bottle containing sugar of lead, on the Montparnasse cemetery,[12] or that of the madman's microscopical studies of the genesis of humanity in _At the Edge of the Sea_. His expressions and metaphors often bear the imprint of overwrought feeling, as when he speaks of the "blood-poisoning cares of the household," or when the impression produced by a visit to parents-in-law is that "of a serpent's hole into which Satan had enticed him." When he describes poor people asleep at night in a railway carriage, as presenting the appearance of corpses on a battlefield and scattered human limbs, we cannot but congratulate ourselves on the dulness of our imagination. Strindberg's "wildness" has been falsely attributed to the influence of alcohol. His use of absinthe, and his habit of heaping all sins upon himself--including that of drunkenness--account for the fable that he was incapable of writing without the aid of alcoholic excesses. He cannot even be placed in the long list of literary and artistic "drunkards "--including the names of Bums, Byron, Charles Lamb, Addison, Musset, Hoffmann, Poe and Baudelaire--to whom alcohol was a means of attaining to inspiration. Strindberg did not seek cortical excitation. He sought oblivion. In _The Great Highway_, "The Hunter" says to "The Wanderer" (Strindberg): "Mr. Incognito, why do you drink so much?" _The Wanderer_: "Because I am always lying on the operating-table, and have to chloroform myself." He was not a man who suffered from chronic congestion of the head in consequence of indifference to all hygienic laws. Ever since the early days when he used to throw himself headlong into the open sea from a rock, he was devoted to cold-water ablutions. His morning exercise, which sometimes was taken so vehemently as to tire him out completely, was part of the routine of daily life. In his home-life he was of methodical, orderly habits; he detested alike uncleanliness and untidiness--in fact, precisely the opposite of what some people have imagined him to be.