Notwithstanding this, his appointment as petty officer was to become of importance to him. As soon as he got his commission he left Bergen for the midland counties--a remarkable journey at that time, by sea and land, through a great part of West and Mid Norway--until he finally arrived at the Fron Vicarage, one of the finest places in the valley of Gudbrandsdalen and at present one of our most popular tourist districts. The vicar of Fron, who was his relation on his mother's side, soon discovered his remarkable abilities, his passion for literature, in which he had already made some trifling attempts, and last but not least, his gift for languages. The two years which Holberg subsequently spent at Fron have, until a quite recent date, been practically unnoticed by Holberg students, but it is easy to see that they form an interesting link in the chain of events connected with his life. His schooldays at Fron were not pleasant to him, for the assistant master, who had to take care of the boys, was rather inferior as a teacher. His Latin was bad, his views narrow and pedantic, his chief instrument of instruction the birch, of which he made assiduous application. Holberg, who rather early reacted instinctively and strongly to all strokes of spontaneousness, very soon conceived a deep dislike and contempt for these pedagogic methods, and his power of reflection made its combinations and conclusions. Latin and pedantry became to a certain extent synonymous notions to him, and it was to be one of his pleasures as a writer to record and hand over to derision the whole system of travestied learning which was one of the characteristic features of his age. This was the negative aspect of his sojourn at the Fron Vicarage. Its positive aspect was the time he spent in the library of the vicarage, where, among a number of Greek and Latin classics, he also found several modern foreign books, including some Bibles in English and French, an English and a French dictionary, a French grammar, and an English reader, with colloquial sentences--rather a curious collection of books for a Norwegian inland county towards the end of the seventeenth century. These books, as far as we know, were the first specimens of English and French literature which he ever saw, but he was fascinated by them. They were to him messages from the great marvellous world hundreds of miles beyond the mountains by which he was surrounded. Do you wonder that he was longing and dreaming, silent and solitary as he was by disposition?