I have often met Strindberg and have received the most contradictory impressions concerning him. But in one way he was always the same, and that was in his outward manner. He demanded respect, and he invariably treated himself with the greatest respect. There was always something subdued and severe about him as though he were keeping guard over an invisible and holy relic, against which neither he nor others might sin; his voice, when he spoke, was low and imperious, and his threatening gaze was always ready to quell any signs of feminine flippancy, although he would have been very unwilling to be deprived of it altogether. That was Strindberg as he appeared to the multitude. But for those who knew him better, there was another Strindberg, not more sociable and affable than the first, but one who was certainly not pompous, who was a thorough Swede, a boon companion whose good hours fell at the first cock-crowing, a humourist with an indistinct smile who played at chess with life, and cared less about the results of the game than for its subtle tactics, a man of great foresight, unreliable, impulsive, a man whose intellect impressed you and who wished to be impressive, and who in addition to this possessed the cunning of a boy. The keynote, which was the solution to the nature of this contradictory and purposely mysterious being, was a suspicion that knew no bounds; suspicion for its own sake, suspicion as a principle, as the prerogative of a superior intellect, a suspicion against every one and everything which ended by becoming a suspicion of himself. Strindberg has Finnish-Lapp blood in his veins. He comes of a poverty-stricken middle-class family which was undergoing a period of great pecuniary distress at the time of his birth. His father had known better times, but through his union with a servant-girl he had dropped out of the social circle to which he belonged. Three children were born before marriage, the author soon after the wedding. The mother was always ailing, and she died of consumption after the birth of her twelfth child. While the boy was growing up, the father and mother, with seven children and two servants, inhabited three rooms. The furniture consisted chiefly of beds and cradles. Children lay on ironing-boards and chairs, children lay in cradles and beds. Baptism, funeral! Baptism, funeral! Sometimes two baptisms one after the other without a funeral. The father was only seen at meals; his name was used to frighten the children, and “Papa shall hear of it,” was equivalent to a whipping. Education consisted in scolding and pulling the hair. Stern discipline was enacted in the home. Lying was unmercifully punished, disobedience likewise, and in after years corporal punishment was superseded by the menace: “What will people say?”