Among the Scandinavians the spirit of self-improvement is very strong. No other foreign-born people respond so eagerly to night-school opportunities. Farmers' institutes command better attendance and attention where they abound than in straight-American neighborhoods. On a holiday celebration the address attracts more Scandinavians, the ball-game or the fireworks, more natives. As patient listeners, they match our Puritan forefathers. No other people take more pride in giving their children a chance. In the words of a Minnesota schoolman, "They are the best people in the State to appreciate education and to want it improved." Unlike the Germans, they have left no mark on American culture. Our ideas and institutions have not been changed by their coming. What they have done is to quicken our interest in the literature of the North, and to win for it academic recognition. A department of Scandinavian is found not only in Harvard and Yale, but also in a dozen universities all the way from Chicago to Seattle. Even the high schools in Minneapolis and elsewhere find place for Scandinavian. [Illustration: Distribution of Scandinavians and natives of Scandinavian Parentage--1910.] REACTION TO AMERICA The commonplace Knud or Swen brings us a mind pinched by the petty parochialism of little countries on the world's byways. Coming from some valley-closet in a mountainous country, only three per cent. of which is fit for the plow, the Norse immigrant is here spiritually enlarged, like the native of a box-cañon let out into a plain, or the cove-dweller who comes to live by the open sea. In a log hut by a lonely fjord in Trondhjem, or on a dreary moor in Finmark, the story of a Norse peasant lad rising to be governor or senator in this country thrills as did, near a thousand years ago, the romantic tale of some Varangian back from service in the emperor's guard at Constantinople. In the home-land, a distinguished Norwegian-American, Dr. Wergeland, finds: Such an oppressive spiritual atmosphere of narrow-minded intolerance, of unloving readiness to raise teacup storms, of insolence, private and political, of clerical and æsthetic arrogance, that the Norseman, though scarcely knowing why, longs to get away from it all and to breathe a fresher, sweeter air. No wonder the people emigrate. There is a peculiar hardness and inflexibility in the Norseman's nature, and the mild virtues of forbearance grow but sparsely in his surroundings. This is perhaps the reason why the Norse immigrant brings to his new homestead for the first four or five years nothing but an open mouth and a silent tongue--speechless astonishment. And this is the reason that to come back to Norway, after spending some years abroad, is so often like coming from open fields into narrow alleys. In this strain writes a North Dakota pioneer: