Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/82

68 from September till the middle of July. There was a roll call, and the reasons for absence were noted. During the summer months some of the assessors went on tours of inspection in the mining districts, and Swedenborg did his share. Reports remain of seven such commissions, often covering several hundred pages. He turned in detailed and meticulous expense accounts. Anyone who has driven through the Swedish forests in a motorcar and even then has felt a certain panic that they would never stop can imagine what it was like for Swedenborg on horseback or in carriage laboring along the roads of his day.

An investigator of the records has written of his "stopping at the inns and farms for food, examining charcoal burners in their lonely huts, or holding meetings with the local agents and owners in a country school house, settling small difficulties, making recommendations as to new appointments, explaining mining statutes to the people, even taking an interest in the establishment of orphanages for the children of miners; often risking his life in steep descents into the gloomy underground caverns, where imperfect shafts and rude ladders made it very dangerous for one not daily accustomed to them." 10

He had far more than a desk job, but besides this he carried out commissions for the family in Stockholm, even to shopping for his sisters—gloves were much in demand—and, to make it a complete human picture, he had a lawsuit with one of the family, his formidable Aunt Brita Behm. She had it with him, rather; it was about a mining property which had been left to them jointly. Emanuel had been called in to help make other members of the clan see reason in such matters, indeed he often gave the decision against his own interests. But Aunt Brita (probably put up to it by someone else) insisted on the physical division of the property, which would have hurt both their interests. This he pointed out in calm cogent words, no matter how much she pettifogged and blustered. A reconciliation was finally arrived at, but for a long while the affair had dragged on. Whenever all else was tranquil, up turned Aunt Brita with a new twist to the lawsuit.11

In Assessor Swedenborg's spare moments, between 1722 and 1731, he had been collecting material for a great work on