unknown even in his native country, save to a few literary people
who knew that he had written some volumes of stories and a book full
of sunshiny reminiscences from Spain. And even now, after his great
success with "Pelle," very little is known about the writer. He was
born in 1869 in one of the poorest quarters of Copenhagen, but spent
his boyhood in his beloved island Bornholm, in the Baltic, in or
near the town, Nexo, from which his final name is derived. There,
too, he was a shoemaker's apprentice, like Pelle in the second part
of the book, which resembles many great novels in being largely
autobiographical. Later, he gained his livelihood as a bricklayer,
until he somehow managed to get to one of the most renowned of our
"people's high-schools," where he studied so effectually that he was
enabled to become a teacher, first at a provincial school, and later
in Copenhagen.

"Pelle" consists of four parts, each, except perhaps the last, a
complete story in itself. First we have the open-air life of the boy
in country surroundings in Bornholm; then the lad's apprenticeship
in a small provincial town not yet invaded by modern industrialism
and still innocent of socialism; next the youth's struggles in
Copenhagen against employers and authorities; and last the man's
final victory in laying the foundation of a garden-city for the
benefit of his fellow-workers. The background everywhere is the
rapid growth of the labor movement; but social problems are never
obtruded, except, again, in the last part, and the purely human
interest is always kept well before the reader's eye through variety
of situation and vividness of characterization. The great charm of
the book seems to me to lie in the fact that the writer knows the
poor from within; he has not studied them as an outsider may, but
has lived with them and felt with them, at once a participant and