creeps down over the tender inside leaves about the ear, then the
coroners prepare for active duty; for the oil of the country is
burned out and it does not take long for the flame to eat up the
wick. It causes no great sensation there when a Dane is found
swinging to his own windmill tower, and most of the Poles after
they have become too careless and discouraged to shave themselves
keep their razors to cut their throats with.

It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very
happy, but the present one came too late in life. It is useless
for men that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for
forty years to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and
naked as the sea. It is not easy for men that have spent their
youth fishing in the Northern seas to be content with following a
plow, and men that have served in the Austrian army hate hard work
and coarse clothing on the loneliness of the plains, and long for
marches and excitement and tavern company and pretty barmaids.
After a man has passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy for him
to change the habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring
with them to the Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have
squandered in other lands and among other peoples.

Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness
did not take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He
had always taken liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do,
but after his first year of solitary life he settled down to it
steadily. He exhausted whisky after a while, and went to alcohol,
because its effects were speedier and surer. He was a big man and
with a terrible amount of resistant force, and it took a great
deal of alcohol even to move him. After nine years of drinking,