_“Segelfoss Town” in 1915 and “The Growth of the Soil”--the title ought to be “The Earth’s Increase”--in 1918 continue along the path Hamsun entered by “Children of the Time.” The scene is laid in his beloved Northland, but the old primitive life is going--going even in the outlying districts, where the pioneers are already breaking ground for new permanent settlements. Business of a modern type has arrived, and much of the quiet humor displayed in these the latest and maturest of Hamsun’s works springs from the spectacle of its influence on the natives, whose hands used always to be in their pockets, and whose credulity in face of the improbable was only surpassed by their unwillingness to believe anything reasonable. Still the life he pictures is largely primitive, with nature as man’s chief antagonist, and to us of the crowded cities it brings a charm of novelty rarely found in books today. With it goes an understanding of human nature which is no less deep-reaching because it is apt to find expression in whimsical or flagrantly paradoxical forms._ _Hamsun has just celebrated his sixtieth birthday anniversary. He is as strong and active as ever, burying himself most of the time on his little estate in the heart of the country that has become to such a peculiar extent his own. There is every reason to expect from him works that may not only equal but surpass the best of his production so far. But even if such expectations should prove false, the body of his work already accomplished is such, both in quantity and quality, that he must perforce be placed in the very front rank of the world’s living writers. To the English-speaking world he has so far been made known only through the casual publication at long intervals of a few of his books: “Hunger,” “Victoria” and “Shallow Soil” (rendered in the list above as “New Earth”). There is now reason to believe that this negligence will be remedied, and that soon the best of Hamsun’s work will be available in English. To the American and English publics it ought to prove a welcome tonic because of its very divergence from what they commonly feed on. And they may safely look to Hamsun as a thinker as well as a poet and laughing dreamer, provided they realize from the start that his thinking is suggestive rather than conclusive, and that he never meant it to be anything else._ EDWIN BJÖRKMAN. Part I It was during the time I wandered about and starved in Christiania: Christiania, this singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there. * * * * *