My father said to me, “Other children talk to themselves up to four and five years old; you are too big for that.” I perceived that things couldn’t go on any longer so; something must be done. It occurred to me that it was the sibilant sound that betrayed me: Signy, Signy; that wouldn’t do. So I changed Signy’s name to Ida. In that way I succeeded in having her sometimes in peace, but Ida never really got the same power of enchantment over me as Signy. One fine day we became enemies, I quarreled with her and called her a silly girl, and perhaps I even went so far as to scratch her. I regretted it to be sure but wouldn’t ask her pardon, and soon after I let her go to the deuce. At the same time I learned to think in silence--and with a few exceptions have continued to do so. But whence had I got Signy? In the same house with us lived a little girl, with whom I sometimes played. Her mother was in the ballet, and once she dressed herself in one of her mother’s ballet skirts. But she was neither Signy nor Ida, she performed no deviltries and had none of Signy’s magic power over my heart. I must, then, at the age of seven have created Signy as the German creates a camel: out of the depths of my consciousness. Then, too, I was predestined. After that the years rolled on, and my genuinely literary impulses arrived, only quite late. The first strong urge came when one of my schoolmates--it was the present Professor Almqvist at the Caroline Institute--during a lesson in Mother Tongue declaimed with powerful effect Viktor Rydberg’s “Flying Dutchman.” I became wild with enthusiasm and for months afterwards dreamed of nothing else than being able at some period in the remote future to write something equally fine. So far I haven’t succeeded, but why should one give up hope? A MASTERLESS DOG A man died, and after he was dead no one looked after his black dog. The dog mourned him long and bitterly. He did not, however, lie down to die on his master’s grave; possibly because he did not know where it was; possibly, too, because he was at bottom a young and happy dog, who considered that there was still something left for him in life.