During the next twelve years he led the life of a rover, but a rover with
a fixed purpose from which he never swerved. First he turned his face
toward Christiania, the capital and the intellectual centre of the
country; and in order to get there he worked at anything that offered
itself. He was a longshoreman on Bodo's docks, a road-labourer, a
lumberjack in the mountains; a private tutor and court messenger. Finally
he reached the metropolis and enrolled as a student at the university. But
the gaunt, raw-boned youth, unpractical and improvident, overbearing of
manner, passionately independent in thought and conduct, failed utterly in
his attempts to realise whatever ambitions he had cherished. So it was
hardly strange that this the first chapter of his Odyssey should end in
the steerage of an American-bound emigrant steamer.

In America, where he landed penniless, he turned his strong and capable
hands to whatever labour he could find. He had intended to become a
Unitarian minister. Instead of doing so he had to work as a farm-hand on
the prairie, street-car conductor in Chicago, dairyman in Dakota; and he
varied these pursuits by giving a series of lectures on French literature
in Minneapolis. By that time he probably imagined that he was equipped for
a more successful attack on the literary strongholds of his own country,
and returned to Christiania. Disappointments and privations followed more
bitter than any he had ever known. He starved and studied and dreamed;
vainly he made the most desperate attempts to gain recognition. In despair
he once more abandoned the battle-field and fled to America again, with
the avowed purpose of gaining a reputation on the lecture platform.

Once more he failed; his countrymen resident in the Northwest would have
none of him. Beaten back in every attempt, discouraged, perhaps feeling
the need of solitude and the opportunities for introspective thought which
he could not find in the larger cities, he exiled himself to that most