a brickfield, and devoted himself to its management, showing no symptom whatever of literary ambition. It was not until 1878 that "he awoke one morning and found himself a novelist." In that year two of his Novelettes appeared anonymously in the feuilleton of the Dagblad, and about the same time he published, with his name, a dramatic sketch, entitled Homewards, in the Nyt norsk Tidsskrift. Leaving Norway for the first time, he passed the greater part of the year 1878 in Paris, polishing his Norwegian Novelettes and writing his French ones. The first series of these sketches appeared in 1879, and was followed by a second, entitled New Novelettes, in 1880. The charm of his limpid prose, as yet unexampled in Norwegian literature, at once raised him to the summit of popularity. Björnson was among the first to welcome his new brother-poet—for a poet he is, though he has written nothing in verse. It now only remained to be seen whether he possessed the staying-power for longer efforts; and this question was answered, in part at least, by his first novel, Garman and Worsë, which appeared in 1880. True, it showed no great constructive skill. Like Middlemarch, though on a much smaller scale, it consisted of three or four different stories running on
