A few years ago I was travelling on foot through Norway, aided by the national means of locomotion, the “skyds.” It was slow work, but it afforded me numberless opportunities of coming in contact with the sons of the soil. On one occasion I met with a peasant on his way home from the “saeter,” who was content to be my guide for hours together, and he gave me some insight into his admiration for Björnson as a political speaker; another time, while I was waiting for horses in a “skyds station,” I examined a little book-case which was hanging over the writing table in the superintendent’s room, and there I found an almost complete set of Björnson’s works. And once it was the “skyds” boy himself who asked me if I knew Björnson. All the women teachers and book-keepers who, with knapsacks on their backs, wander across the mountains of their native land, carry his name upon their lips and his books in their hearts. High up at the foot of Skineggen in Jötunheimen, in the midst of eternal snow, I asked a haggard-looking old Valdres peasant who kept the tourist’s house there during the six weeks of summer, which was my nearest way to Björnson, and he answered with an approving smile addressing me in the second person singular: “Thou knowest Björnson, thou art an intelligent young lady. Trust me and I will tell thee all that thou wouldest know.” Whereupon he went indoors and fetched a large map of the Norwegian mountains, which he spread out on the short grass between us, and proceeded to point up and down with his finger into Gudbrandsdal and from thence to the south till he came to a spot where he stopped short, and said: “Here is Aulestad, Björnson’s place. Every one who wishes to go there may do so, thou also.” Then he began a long complicated account of the why and the wherefore Björnson is beloved by the peasant, said that he was a “homely man” who went “straight ahead”; and then he told me of the difficulties that he and his neighbours had encountered in order to hear him speak, and how they had gone long journeys to attend meetings in distant places.