a drug-store. Did Mr. Anstey know this, or was it the sheer adventure of genius, when he concentrated the qualities of the master into “Pill-Doctor Herdal,” compounding “beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a real grip on the world”? Ibsen, it is allowable to think, may sometimes have dreamed of a pill, “with arsenic in it, Hilda, and digitalis, too, and strychnine, and the best beetle-killer,” which would decimate the admirable inhabitants of Grimstad, strewing the rocks with their bodies in their best go-to-meeting coats and dresses. He had in him that source of anger, against which all argument is useless, which bubbles up in the heart of a youth who vaguely feels himself possessed of great native energy, and knows not how to stir a hand or even formulate a wish. He was savage in manners, unprepossessing in appearance, and, as he himself has told us with pathetic naïveté, unable to express the real gratitude he felt to the few who would willingly have extended friendship to him if he had permitted it.
As he advanced in age, he does not seem to have progressed in grace. By the respectable citizens of Grimstad—and even Grimstad had its little inner circle of impenetrable aristocracy—he was regarded as “not quite nice.” The apothecary’s assistant was a bold young man, who did
