vantage of that force. “Afterwards, when I read about the guillotine, I always thought of those saws,” said the poet, whose earliest flight of fancy seems to have been this association of womanhood with the shriek of the sawmill.
In 1888, just before his sixtieth birthday, Ibsen wrote out for Henrik Jæger certain autobiographical recollections of his childhood. It is from these that the striking phrase about the scream of the saws is taken, and that is perhaps the most telling of these infant memories, many of which are slight and naïve. It is interesting, however, to find that his earliest impressions of life at home were of an optimistic character. “Skien,” he says, “in my young days, was an exceedingly lively and sociable place, quite unlike what it afterwards became. Several highly cultivated and wealthy families lived in the town itself or close by on their estates. Most of these families were more or less closely related, and dances, dinners and music parties followed each other, winter and summer, in almost unbroken sequence. Many travellers, too, passed through the town, and, as there were as yet no regular inns, they lodged with friends or connections. We almost always had guests in our large, roomy house, especially at Christmas and Fair-time, when the house was full, and we kept open table from morning till night.”
