The Red Room

Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter.Excerpt-It was an evening in the beginning of May. The little garden on "Moses Height," on the south side of the town had not yet been thrown open to the public, and the flower-beds were still unturned. The snowdrops had worked through the accumulations of last year's dead leaves, and were on the point of closing their short career and making room for the crocuses which had found shelter under a barren pear tree; the elder was waiting for a southerly wind before bursting into bloom, but the tightly closed buds of the limes still offered cover for love-making to the chaffinches, busily employed in building their lichen-covered nests between trunk and branch.