With that spell upon us we went back into the dark theatre. Under the one light, chattering women were packing the dolls and a man went about slamming up seats. An expressman came, the trunks were taken away, and the women left as noisily as they had come. The doors were closed, and we waited in front of the theatre under a blazing white light. A great limousine rolled up; a laughing group came from the stage entrance: Paderewski in a high silk hat, a loose cape about his shoulders. He got into the lighted car, waved his farewells to the group on the sidewalk, touched a slight kiss to someone, and was driven away into the bright city. “_Pelle the Conqueror_”[1] _Daybreak_, the last of the four “Pelle” books, will come from the publishers this fall. I wonder how many people in this country have read the other three, or have ever heard of Martin Anderson Nexø? I went into McClurg’s last Christmas to buy the first two volumes, but they told me they had ordered only one copy and it had been sold. In all of Chicago there wasn’t one to be had. There was an epidemic of _Jean-Christophe_ here; every one had to read it whether he was an audience for Rolland or not. Critics like to compare _Pelle_ and _Jean-Christophe_ by saying that Nexø has done for a labor leader what Rolland did for a musician. But he hasn’t: Rolland tells the life of an artist and makes of it a great tract; Nexø tells the life of a labor leader and makes of it a great work of art. The difference is something like this: underneath _Jean-Christophe_ lies a skeleton structure of Rolland’s on which he is constantly working, through Christophe’s experiences in art, to raise a monument to the life force; in _Pelle_ the life force sweeps all treatises from Nexø’s hands and raises a monument to art. Labor itself is the only thing that can help labor,—the only thing except Art. People can read about the wrongs of labor in the social magazines until they are blind, and stop outside the words. But here is something to stir the imagination, to make them feel and then to think about labor. And the poor! Nexø has made an _Arabian Nights_ of the poor. But instead of incense and magic and white palaces with gilded domes he tells of the fragile, perfect things the poor have out of Nothing,—out of which all beautiful things are made. That first night in Bornholm when Pelle, left all alone in the shipyard, stoops down in the half dark to see if the ground is pink as he has seen it painted on a map in Sweden—that stuck me in the heart, and I knew how it would be with Pelle in the end. That is the whole story, really: Pelle was always looking for the painted ground. In _Daybreak_, although I have heard nothing of the book, I know Pelle finds it for himself and makes it for the poor.