are never taken to it. At about fifteen, Hamsun had an experience which is rarely mentioned as part of the scant biographical material made available by his reserve concerning his own personality. He returned to the old home of his parents in the Gudbrand Valley and worked for a few months as clerk in a country store--a store just like any one of those that figure so conspicuously in almost every one of his novels. The place and the work must have made a revolutionary impression on him. It apparently aroused longings, and it probably laid the basis for resistances and resentments that later blossomed into weedlike abundance as he came in contact with real city life. There runs through his work a strange sense of sympathy for the little store on the border of the wilderness, but it is also stamped as the forerunner and panderer of the lures of the city. As a boy of eighteen, when working in a tiny coast town as a cobbler's apprentice, he ventured upon his first literary endeavors and actually managed to get two volumes printed at his own cost. The art of writing was in his blood, exercising a call and a command that must have been felt as a pain at times, and as a consecration at other times. Books and writing were connected with the city. Perhaps the hatred that later days developed, had its roots in a thwarted passion. Even in the little community where his first scribblings reached print he must have felt himself in urban surroundings, and perhaps those first crude volumes drew upon him laughter and scorn that his sensitive soul never forgot. If something of the kind happened, the seed thus sown was nourished plentifully afterwards, when, as a young man, Hamsun pitted his ambitions against the indifference first of Christiania and then of Chicago. The result was a defeat that seemed the more bitter because it looked like punishment incurred by straying after false gods.