temperamental qualities, which the abnormal psychologist is in the
habit of associating with that not inconsiderable group of cases in
which the emotional and temperamental characteristics of the
opposite sex are dominant in the individual. His ancestry has been
traced back to the sixteenth century, when his father's family was
of the titled aristocracy, later, generation after generation,
becoming churchmen, although Strindberg's father, Carl Oscar,
undertook a commercial career. His mother, Ulrica Eleanora Norling,
was the daughter of a poor tailor, whom Strindberg's father first
met as a waitress in a hotel, and, falling in love with her,
married, after she had borne him three children.

August, christened Johann August, the fourth child, was born at
Stockholm, January 22, 1849, soon after his father had become a
bankrupt. There was little light or cheer in the boy's home; the
misfortune that overtook the family at the time of August's birth
always hung over them like a dark cloud; the mother became nervous
and worn from the twelve child-births she survived, the father
serious and reserved. The children were brought up strictly and as
August was no favorite, loneliness and hostility filled even his
earliest years.

His first school days were spent among boys of the better class,
who turned up their noses at his leather breeches and heavy boots.
He was taken away from that school and sent where there was a lower
class of boys, whose leader he soon became, but in his studies he
was far from precocious, though not dull.

As he grew up the family fortunes bettered, and he attended a
private school patronized by cultivated and wealthy people. Mixing