Through Scandinavia to Moscow

In the same compartment with ourselves sat a couple of young Germans. They were much interested in each other. I noticed that the lady’s rings were most of them shining new, and one, a large plain gold ring, was in look particularly recent and refulgent. H came to the same conclusion also at about the very same moment. The two were surely a bridal pair. And they talked German, and looked out across us through the wide windows as though we were never there. So I spoke to my wife in good United States, and we agreed that these two were newly wed. And then the bride’s noble face and fine brown eyes appealed to me, and I declared her to be the loveliest woman I had yet seen this side the sea. The while she and her Mann still conversed in low, soft German. But it now seemed to me that they looked out across us with a kindlier feeling in their eyes and, in a surreptitious way, the German beauty was peeping at the fine large diamond on H’s left hand (the wedding ring she had already succeeded in making look dull and old). At Goteborg (Gothenburg) our train drew up for half an hour’s wait. Here that portion of it going to Stockholm would be cut loose from our own, and another engine would take us to the north. Along with most of the other passengers the young German and I also got out, leaving the two ladies in the car. At the counter of the big lunch room I watched the ever hungry Norsemen stowing away cold fish and cheese, and was in somewhat of a dilemma what to take, when the German husband of the lovely bride came up to me in a most friendly way, and suggested that I would enjoy a certain sort of fish and thin brown cake, which seemed to be one of the popular objects of attack by the voracious multitude. And he spoke to me in perfect English of the educated sort. He had evidently quite understood my flattering comments upon his bride, and was now my fast friend. I did not show surprise, but took his hint, and afterward we strolled up and down the platform, munching our snack, while he told me that he was a “barrister from Cologne.” “Yes, on his wedding trip.” He had “learned English in the German schools,” he said, and had “never been in England or America.” His wife, he admitted, “could not speak English,” but “could read it and understand it when others talked!” He told me of the German courts, and of his long years of study before he was admitted to the bar. When they left us a few miles further on, for their way lay up through the lakes and forests of Sweden, we parted as old friends, and they promised to visit us if ever they should come across the sea; our unsuspecting admiration had won their hearts!

About 4 p. m., we dined at the small station of Ed, our first example of Swedish railway dinner-serving on an elaborate scale. The train was a long one. There were many passengers. The fish and cheese consumed at Gothenburg was long since shaken down. We were genuinely hungry. But when the train came to a stop there was no rush to the restaurant, nor attempt of every man to get ahead of the one in front of him. The passengers took their leisure to get out, and walked deliberately toward the big eating room. The food was set upon a long central table. There were hot soups, hot boiled fowl, hot meats, an abundance of victuals, cold and salt. There were piles of plates, of napkins and of knives and forks. Everyone helped himself, and ate standing or carried his food to a little table and sat at ease. This latter plan we followed. Rule: Eat all you will, drink as much beer as you desire, take your own time, the train will wait, and when you are quite satisfied pay a single kroner (twenty-seven cents). There is no watching to see how much you may consume. You eat your fill, you pay the modest charge, you go your deliberate way. However slow you may be the train will wait!

We now traversed a barren country of marshy flats; with skimp timber, chiefly small birch and spruce. Toward dusk it was raining hard. The long twilight had fairly begun when we crossed the Swedish border and a few miles beyond stopped at Fredrikshald, where is a famous fortress against the Swedes, besieging which, King Charles XII was killed. Here a customs’ officer walked rapidly through the car, asked a few questions and passed us on. Our trunks had been marked “through” from Helsinoere, so we had no care for them until we should arrive in Kristiania. But that there should be still maintained a customs’ line between the sister kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, which are ruled by a common King, may perhaps surprise the stranger unacquainted with the peculiar and somewhat strained relations ever existing between these kindred peoples.

For many hundreds of years (since 1380) Norway had been a province of Denmark. Her language and that of the Dane had grown to be almost the same, the same when written and printed, and differing only when pronounced. But in 1814, the selfish powers of the Holy Alliance handed over Norway to the Swedish crown as punishment to Denmark for being Napoleon’s friend, and threatened to enforce their arbitrary act by war. So Norway yielded to brute force, and accepted the sovereignty of Napoleon’s treacherous Marshal Bernadotte, the Swedish King, but she yielded nothing more, and to this day has preserved and yet jealously maintains her own independent Parliament, her own postal system, her own separate currency and her Custom Houses along the Swedish line. And you never hear a Norwegian speak of any other than of the “King of Sweden.” “He is not our King,” they say, “we have none.” “We are ruled by the King of Sweden, but Norway has no[Pg 45][Pg 46] King.” Cunning Russia, it is said, cleverly spends many rubles in order that this independent spirit shall be kept awake, and the war force of Sweden thereby be so much weakened. Russia might even to this day be able to nourish into war this ancient feud between the kindred breeds, if it were not that in her greed of power she has shown the cloven foot. The horror of her monstrous tyranny in Finland already finds echo among the Norwegian mountains. “We are getting together,” a Norwegian said to me. “We have got to get together, however jealous we may be of one another. We must, or else the Russian bear will hug us to our death, even as now he is cracking the ribs of helpless Finland.” And when I suggested that little Denmark should be taken within the pale, and a common Scandinavian Republic be revived in more than ancient force to face the world, he declared that already a movement toward this end was set afoot, and only needed a favorable opportunity to become a living fact.

At 11 p. m. we arrived at Kristiania in a pouring rain, and at General C’s recommendation, came to this curious and comfortable hotel. Like many other hotels in Norway, it is kept by women, and seems to be much patronized by substantial Norwegians of the nicer sort. It is on the top floor of a tall building, and you pass up and down in a rapid modern elevator. It is kept as clean as a pin, and the beds we sleep in are the softest, freshest in mattress and linen we have seen this side the sea. We have also passed beyond the latitude of blankets and are come to the zone of eider down. Coverlets, light, buoyant, and delightfully warm now keep us from the cold, and in our narrow bedsteads we sleep the slumber of contented innocence. We have a large well-furnished chamber, all for two kroner per day (fifty-four cents). When we entered the long, light breakfast hall this morning, we saw a single table running the length of the room, a white cloth upon it, and ranged up and down, a multitude of cheeses big and little, cow cheese and goat cheese, and many sorts of cold meat, beef and pork and mutton, and cold fish and salt fish. And there were piles of cold sliced bread and English “biscuits” (crackers). The coffee, or milk if you wish it, is brought in, and in our case so are fresh soft-boiled eggs. A group of evidently English folk near us had a special pot of Dundee marmalade. The Norwegians take simply their coffee or milk, with cheese and cold fish and the cold bread. Our breakfast cost us twenty cents apiece.

To-day the city is washed delightfully clean, the heavy rain of the night having cleared streets and atmosphere of every particle of dust and grime. We have driven all about in an open victoria. It is a splendid town, containing some two hundred thousand inhabitants. It lies chiefly upon a sloping hillside with a deep harbor at its feet. Like Copenhagen, it is the capital of its country, and the seat of the Norwegian Government, of the Supreme Law Courts, and of the Storthing or National Congress or Parliament. At the end of the wide Karl Johans Gade stands the “Palace of the Swedish King,” a sombre edifice, now rarely occupied. Kristiania is also the literary and art center of the Norse people. Here Ibsen lives, here Bjoernstjoerne Bjoernsen would live, if Swedish intolerance did not drive him into France. The types of men and women we see upon the streets are the finest we have met since coming over sea. Tall and well-built, light-haired and blue-eyed, the men carry themselves with great dignity. The women are, many of them, tall, their backs straight, not the curved English spine and stooping shoulders. All have good chins, alert and initiative. The Norwegians are the pick of the Scandinavian peoples. They are the sons and daughters of the old Viking breeds which led the race. They are to-day giving our northwestern states a population able, fearless and progressive, no finer immigration coming to our shores. Senators and Governors of their stock are already making distinguished mark in American affairs.

It was not long before we perceived that in Kristiania, as in Copenhagen, we were also very close to the great Republic; except that, perhaps, here we discovered a keener sympathy with American feeling, a closer touch with the American spirit.

Those Norwegians whom we have met speak good United States, not modern English. You hear none of the English sing-song flutter of the voice, none of its suppression of the full-sounded consonant, but the even, clear, precise accent and intonation of the well-taught American mouth. And our friends tell us that it is much easier for them to learn to speak the American tongue than to master the often extraordinary inflexion of spoken English as pronounced in Britain. I am gaining a great respect for these Scandinavian and Norwegian peoples. They are among the finest of the races of the European world.

We have driven not merely through the beautiful city and its parks, and beheld the wide view to be had from the tower at its highest point, but we have also visited the ancient Viking ship, many years ago discovered and dug out of the sands along the sea, a measured model of which was so boldly sailed across the Atlantic, and floated on Lake Michigan, at Chicago, in 1892.

At this time, however, we are but birds of passage in Kristiania. We may not linger to become more intimately acquainted with the noble town; we are arranging for a ten days’ journey by boat and carriage through the fjords and mountain valleys, and region of the mighty snow-fields and glaciers of western Norway. We must now go on, and postpone any intimate knowledge of the city until another day.

H is quite ready for this trip. She wears a corduroy shirt waist of deep purple shade, and has brought with her one of those short, simply-cut walking-skirts, of heavy cloth. A natty toque sets off her head. She is fitly clad. And my eyes are not the only ones that note this fact, as I observed to-day when, to avoid[Pg 49][Pg 50] a shower, we sought shelter under the pillared portico of the Storthing’s fine edifice in the central square. As we stood there, waiting for the rain to cease, I noticed a small, fair-haired, quietly-dressed woman intently staring at the skirt. Each hem and tuck and fold and crease and gore she studied with the steadfast eye of the connoisseur. And so absorbed did she become that she grew quite oblivious of our knowledge of her interest. Around and around she circled, until at last we left her still taking mental notes. Some other woman in Kristiania, we are quite sure, will soon be wearing a duplicate of this well made costume from New York.

VI

A Day Upon the Rand Fjord and Along the Etna Elv – To Frydenlund – Ole Mon Our Driver

    Frydenlund, Norge, September 1, 1902.

We left Kristiania about seven o’clock this morning and drove six kilometers to Grefsen, a suburb where the new railway comes in, which will ultimately connect the capital with Bergen on the west coast. Grefsen is up on the hills back of the city. The cars of the train we traveled in were long like our own and also set on trucks, the compartments being commodious, like the one we rode in from Helsingborg.

We traversed a country of spruce forests, rapid streams, small lakes and green valleys; with red-roofed farmsteads, cattle, sheep and horses in the meadows, and yellowing fields of oats and rye, just now being reaped; where men were driving the machines and women raking the fallen grain, all a beautiful, fertile, well-populated land with big men, big women, rosy and well set up, usually yellow-haired and blue-eyed.

About ten o’clock we arrived at Roikenvik, on the Rand Fjord, a sheet of dark blue water about two miles wide and thirty or forty long, with high, fir-clad mountains on either hand; with green slopes dotted with farm buildings, and occasional hamlets where stopped our tiny steamboat, the Oscar II. This fjord is more beautiful than a Scottish loch, for here the mountains are heavily timbered with fir to their very summits, while the hills of Scotland are bare and bleak.

We sat contentedly upon the upper deck inhaling the keen, fresh air, watching the picturesque panorama and noting the passengers crowded upon the forward deck below. They were chiefly farmers getting on and off, intelligent, self-respecting, well-appearing men, and full of good humor. One old gentleman with snowy whiskers, who resembled an ancient mariner, which I verily believe he was, seemed to hold the center of attention and many and loud were the shouts which his quaint jests brought forth. He evidently delivered a lecture upon my big American valise, pointing to it and explaining its excellent make, and his remarks were apparently to the credit of the owner, and of America whence it came.

Just before the bell summoned us to dinner in the after cabin, I noticed a skiff rowing toward us, one of the three men in it waving his hat eagerly to our Captain, who immediately stopped the boat until they drew beside us, when two of them, clean-cut, rosy-faced, young six-footers, came up, hand over hand, on a rope which was lowered to them. They were born sailors, like all Norwegians. I snapped my kodak as their skiff drew near us, and the first news the Captain gave them was to apprise them of that fact. They appeared to be greatly flattered by the attention. They laughed and bowed and looked at me as much as to say, “How much we should like a copy of the photograph, if we knew enough English to ask for it,” but they were too diffident to make the suggestion through their Captain friend.

With the Captain himself, I became well acquainted; an alert man of affairs, who had knocked about the world on Norwegian ships and visited the greater ports of the United States. He gave me an interesting account of Norse feeling at the time of the outbreak of the Spanish war, saying to me, “I am from Bergen. I am a sailor like the rest of our people, and with about a thousand more of my fellow countrymen I went over at that time to New York. I was boatswain on the warship – and I served through the Spanish war. When we heard that there was likely to be trouble and got a hint that you wanted seamen, I gathered the men together and we went over and enlisted and others followed. Yes, there were several thousands of us, altogether, on your American warships, ready to give up our lives for the great Republic. Next to Norway, your great, free country, where already live half of the Norwegian race, lies closest to our hearts. We were ready to give up our lives for the stars and stripes. When the war was over most of us came back again. In the summer time I am captain of this boat, in the winter seasons I go out upon the sea. If America ever needs us again we are ready to help her. We Norwegians will fight for America whenever she calls.”

Then he spoke of Norway and the growing irritation of the Norwegian people against the assumptions of Sweden. “It is true that the Swedes are our kin, but we have never liked them. The Norwegians are democrats. We have manhood suffrage, and each man is equal before the law. In Sweden, there is a nobility who are privileged, and while the Swedish people submit to the aristocrats running the Government over there, we Norwegians will never permit them to run us. If it were not for fear of Russia, we would fall apart, but the Russian bear is hungry. If he dared he would eat us up. If it were not for England he would devour Sweden now, and then there would be no hope for Norway. The Russian Czar wants our harbors, our great fjords, as havens for his fleets, and he would like to fill his ships with Norwegian seamen. So we fret and growl at Sweden, but we can’t afford really to have trouble with her any more than she can afford to fall out with us. We must stand together if we are to maintain our national independence, but nevertheless, we are full of fear for the future. I am apprehensive that the bear will some day satisfy his hunger. France will hold down Germany, who just now claims to be our friend also. England will be bought off by Russian promises in some other quarter of the world, and then, we shall be at the mercy of the Czar. God help us when that day comes! Those of us who can will fly to America, all except those who die upon these mountains. The Russians may finally take Norway, but it will then be a devastated and depeopled land. America is our foster mother. Our young men go to her. We are always ready to fight for her!”

As I looked into his strong blue eyes, which gazed straight at me, I felt that the man meant everything he said, and was expressing not alone his personal sentiment, but also the feeling of the sturdy, seafaring people of whom he was so fit a type, and I wondered what the Spaniard would have thought if he had known when he sent his fleets across the sea – fleets deserted by the Scotch engineers who, in times of peace, had kept their engines clean – that the United States could call at need, not merely upon its own immense population, but might equally rely upon the greatest seafaring folk of all the world to fill her fighting ships.

After three and a half hours’ sail – about thirty miles – we came to the end of the fjord at Odnaes, where was awaiting us a true Norwegian carriage, a sort of landau or trille with two bob-maned Norwegian ponies, in curious harness with collar and hames thrusting high above the neck. We had dined on the boat; we had only a valise, a hand-bag and our sea-rugs. We were soon in the carriage and began our first day’s drive, a journey of fifty-four kilometers (thirty-two miles), before night.

Our driver was presented to us as “Ole Mon;” and the English-speaking owner of the carriage informed us that Ole (“Olie”) Mon spoke fluently our tongue. He was a sturdily built, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed man some forty years of age with a gray moustache and smooth, weather-beaten face. He drove these tourists’ carriages in summer, he said; in the winter he took to the sea. We soon discovered his English to be limited to a few simple phrases, while when he ran to the end of his vocabulary he never hesitated to put in a fit Norwegian word. He was proud of his acquaintance with the foreign tongue, and delighted to exercise his knowledge of it. His chief concern in life was to take care of the ponies. He continually talked to them as though they were his boys, and at any excuse for a stop, always had nosebags filled with oat meal ready to slip on and give them a lunch. The ponies are not over eight or ten hands high, but are powerfully muscled, and they are as sleek and tame as kittens. We believe that we have a treasure in Ole Mon, and I expect to learn much from him about the country we traverse, for he is glib to talk.

The road was superb, the scenery magnificent. We followed a deep fertile valley, along a roaring river, the Etna Elv – recent rains having filled the streams brim full – with high fir-clad mountains rising sheer on either hand. We climbed gradually for quite twenty miles, meeting and passing many curious two-wheeled carts, drawn by a single horse, called stolkjaerres, in which the driver sits behind the passenger, and about four o’clock we halted at Tomlevolden, a rambling farmstead where Ole Mon put the nosebags on the ponies and we rested until the bags were emptied.

Here, we visited a dairy cow barn, – a large airy building finished in planed lumber, with long rows of stalls where the cows face each other, standing on raised floors and with a wide middle aisle where the feeders pass down between. So scrupulously clean was it that each day it must be washed out and scrubbed. In one end stood a big stone furnace, a sort of oven, to keep the cattle warm through the dark cold winter time, and fresh spring water was piped to a little trough set at each stall.

Some years ago, having spent the night at a West Virginia mountain farm, in middle winter, I looked out of the window in the morning and beheld the family cow with about a foot of snow piled on her back and belly-deep in an icy drift. I remarked, “It has snowed some in the night.” Mine host replied that “he reckoned it had.” And then talking of the snow, I told him that I had seen snow eight feet deep way up in Canada. He looked at me incredulously and inquired, “Say, what mought the cows do in such snow as that.” Would that I might show him and his like this Norwegian cow barn!

Then we went on till 7 p. m., when we reached the famous Sanatorium of Tonsaasen, almost at the summit of the long grade, a spacious wooden hotel overlooking a profound dal, down which plunges a cascade.

The hotel is kept by a big, bustling woman who speaks perfect cockney English, and who tells us she has “lived in Lonnon, although a native Norwegian.” She wears a large white apron and a white lace cap, and she has received H in most motherly fashion. Indeed, our coming has greatly piqued her curiosity. She has asked us many questions and has taken H aside and inquired confidentially whether I am not a deserting soldier, and whether she is not eloping with me! She is evidently alert for military scandal, and was sorely disappointed and half incredulous when H declared that she and I were really man and wife. The truth is, Norway is become the retreat for so many runaway couples, recreant husbands and truant wives, that the good people of these caravansaries are quite ready to add you to the list of shady episodes. Even when I boldly wrote several postal cards to America and handed them to mine hostess to mail, I felt sure that after she had carefully read them she would scarcely yet believe our tale.

Here we were given a bounteous supper of eggs, coffee, milk, cream, chicken, hare, trout, five sorts of cheese, and big hot rolls, and all for thirty-five cents each. The ponies were also fed again, and at eight o’clock we moved on twelve miles further, crossing the divide and rolling down into the valley of the Baegna Elv in the long twilight, and then brilliant starlight, coming at last to a typical Norwegian inn, at Frydenlund, not far from the lovely Aurdals Vand. This is the main road in winter between Bergen and Kristiania, and is then more traveled by sleighs and sledges than even now by carriages. All along the way there are frequent inns and post-houses. To-morrow we start at eight o’clock, and go on sixty-one miles more.

Our inn is a roomy farmhouse where “entertainment is kept,” even as it used to be along the stage-traversed turnpikes of old Virginia, and adjoining it are extensive barns and stables. There seemed to be many travelers staying the night. We are really at an important point, for here two state highways separate, the one over which we have come leading to Odnaes, and the other diverging southward toward Lake Spirillen and the country known as the Valders, continuing on straight through to Kristiania. The house is painted white, and has about it an air quite like a farmstead in New England or New York. We were expected when we arrived. Word of our coming had been telephoned from Tonsaasen, and also from Kristiania. A large bedroom on the second story is given us. The floor is painted yellow and strips of rag carpet are laid beside the narrow bedsteads, where we sleep under eider down. I am writing by the light of a home-made candle. It is late, the silence of the night is unbroken save by the ticking of the tall clock on the staircase landing outside my door, and the occasional neighing of a horse or lowing of a cow. It is the silence of the contented country-side.

VII

A Drive Along the Baegna Elv – the Aurdals Vand and Many More to Skogstad

    Skogstad, Norway, September 2, 1902.

Here we are eighty-four kilometers (sixty-one miles) from Frydenlund, where we spent last night. All day we have sat in an easy carriage, inhaled the glorious buoyant air, and driven over a superb macadamized road. We have skirted the shores of five lakes or vands– called fjords, – amidst towering snow-marked mountains, passing beneath cliffs rising sheer above us for thousands of feet, the highway sometimes a mere gallery cut into the solid rock, and we are now wondering how we were ever such simple things as to waste our time in tame England, or even linger among what now seem so commonplace, Scottish lochs and tarns. We have traversed the shores of the Aurdal, the Stranda, the Granheim, the Slidre and the Vangsmjoesen Fjords, each and all pools of the foaming river Baegna; and have looked across their limpid waters, their clustered islets, their shimmering surfaces reflecting field and forest and fjeld, and even portraying as in a mirror the snow-fields of mountain heights so far distant as to be indistinguishable to the naked eye, distant yet two full days’ journey to the west. We have been continually excited and astonished as each succeeding vista of vale and lake and mountain has burst upon us.

As we advanced further and further along the wide white military road, the valley of the Baegna Elv grew narrower and deeper, and the contrasts of verdant meadow and dark mountain increased in sharpness. The lower slopes are as green and well watered as those of Switzerland, and are dotted with farmsteads where the thrifty Norse farmer dwells upon his own land, independent, self-respecting, recognizing no lord but God – for the title of the “Swedish King” weighs but little here. Everywhere have I remarked a trim neatness, exceeding, if it were possible, even that of Holland. Upon the meadows were cattle, mostly red. The fields were ripe with rye and oats and barley where men and women were garnering the crops. The lands were cleared far up the mountain sides to where the forests of dark green fir stretched further up, until beyond the timber-line bare black rock masses played hide and seek among the clouds.

Back and beyond this splendid panorama of vale and lake and cloud-wrapped summit, far beyond it, binding the horizon on the west, there grew upon our vision all the afternoon enormous heights of stern and austere mountains, lifting themselves into the very zenith, their slopes gleaming with white bands of snow, their topmost clefts nursing glittering icepacks and glaciers. Ole Mon has constantly pointed toward them saying “Yotunheim!” “Yotunheim!” and we have known them to be the gigantic ice-bound highlands of the celebrated Jotunheim Alps, the loftiest snow mountains of Norway.

We left the inn at Frydenlund after a breakfast of brook trout, fried to a turn, and all we could eat of them, delicious milk like that from our blue grass counties of Greenbrier and Monroe, in West Virginia, and coffee made as only an Americanized Norwegian may know how.

Along the way we have met children evidently going to and returning from their schools, and it has been charming to see how the little boys pull off their caps, and the little girls drop down in a courtesy. The little caps always come off the yellow heads with sweeping bow, and the duck of the little girls is always accompanied by a smile of greeting. I regret that in America we have lost these pretty customs which were once taught as good manners by our forebears.

We have passed this morning a frowning stone jail, the prison of this province, and Ole Mon tells us that it is quite empty and has had no tenant for some two years; surely, convincing testimony of the innate honesty of these sturdy folk.

We have also to-day met many young men, tall and stalwart, clad in the dark blue uniform of the Norwegian National Guard. This is the season when the annual drills are going on, just at the end of the harvest time. Norway, like the rest of Europe, has adopted universal military training for her men. They are taught the art of war and how to shoot. It is calculated that in eight or ten years more every Norwegian of voting age will have had the necessary military training and will have become a part of the effective national defense. “We will never have trouble with Sweden,” they say, “the Swedes and ourselves only show our teeth.” “It is Russia, hungry Russia, that we fear. We will learn to march and shoot and dig entrenchments so that we may defend ourselves against the aggression of the Slav. Upon the sea, we are the masters. We learn in your navy how to handle modern warships and shoot the giant guns. Upon these mountains, we hope, ere another decade has elapsed, also to be safe against the encroachment of that ‘Great White peril.’”

We stopped for our first pony-feed at Fagernaes, where a road turns off to Lake Bygdin and its Elv, where the English go to fish; halted a half hour at Fosheim, where is a fine hotel, and then, passing the ancient stone church of Vestre Slidre, drove on to Loeken, where a reindeer-steak-and-salmon-trout-dinner awaited us. The inn, situated on a rocky point overlooking the picturesque Slidre Vand, was quakerly-clean, as all of these places are. The neatly dressed young woman who waited on us had lived two years in Dakota, and in Spokane, and spoke perfect United States. She had an uncle and a brother still there, and hoped to go back herself when the old folks had passed away. At Oeilo, fifteen kilometers further on, we also drew rein – each time we stop the ponies have the nosebags of oat meal – and then we paused again at Grindaheim at the Vang Hotel, close to the shores of the Vangsmjoesen Vand. Here the mistress of the inn had lived in Minnesota, and talked with us like one of our own countrywomen. She had come home on a little visit, she said. A stalwart Norseman had lost his heart and won her hand, and saved-up dollars – but yet her spirit longed for free America. Her boys would go there as soon as they were big enough to hustle for themselves.

In the dining room of the comfortable house was gathered a collection of stuffed and mounted birds of the surrounding countryside. There were several ptarmigan and one fine capercailzie, the cousin to the black cock, and the biggest thing of the pheasant-kind that flies in Northern Europe.

Our Minnesotan hostess pressed us to stay and tarry a few days, setting before us a big pitcher of milk and little caraway-seed-flavored tea cakes, all for the price of Te Oere, two and a half cents. We would like to have lingered here, for the house is nestled in one of the wildest and loveliest of dales. To the north, a mile across the vand, tower the black precipitous heights of the giant Skodshorn (5,310 feet) upon whose cloud-capped peaks, Ole Mon tells us, the ghosts of the ancient Scalds and Vikings meet in berserker combat with Thor and Odin, and whence, sometimes, when the air is still and there are no storms about, the clangs and clashes of their battle conflicts resound with thunder roars, waking the echoes in all the valleys round. Then the black mountain sides breathe forth gigantic jets of steamlike cloud, while it is at such times also that the Trolls and Gnomes creep forth from the shadows of the rocks to do honor to the warring giants. When questioned closely, he admitted he had never witnessed one of these combats, but declared that when a boy he had heard the roar on the summit of the mountain and had seen the white clouds shoot up, which is always the sign of victory for the gods. Our hostess also asserted that she had once heard the mountain roar, but admitted she had not seen the shooting clouds. Some scientists try to explain the mountain’s action according to natural laws, but so great is my faith in Ole Mon that I dare not dispute his word. Back of the little inn also rise the lofty masses of the Grinde Fjeld (5,620 feet) upon whose moorland summits it is, the capercailzie fly and the herds of reindeer range, whence came the juicy steaks we ate to-day at Loeken and have had to-night for supper.

All along the Baegna valley, including the fertile basins wherein nestle the many vands or lesser fjords, there were men and women in the fields mowing the short grass and ripening grain. But neither the grasses, nor the rye and oats and barley had reached maturity. Nor do they ever fully ripen in these cold latitudes. They must be cut green, and then the feeble sunshine must be made the most of. Long ricks, made of sticks and saplings, or poles barred with cross-pieces set on at intervals are built extending through the fields, and on these the grass and grain are carefully spread out, hung on a handful at a time, so that each blade and straw may catch the sun, and dry out, a tedious, laborious work on which the women were more generally employed. The men bring up back-loads newly cut by scythe and sickle, and throw them down before the women, who then carefully hang each handful on the ricks. What must a Norwegian feel, trained to such painstaking toil as this, when he at first sets foot upon the boundless wheat lands of Minnesota and the prairie West. No wonder he returns to his native homestead only to make a hasty visit, never to remain. In Switzerland, I also saw the grass cut when scarcely half ripe and but a few inches high, when it is stored in handy little log cribs where in the course of time it slowly dries out, but here every blade must be hung up in the sun and air if it shall turn to hay. When the hay and grain is fully dried, it is taken down and done up into loosely bound sheaves, or carried in bulk to the large, roomy barns. The grain is generally thrashed out with flails, I am told, although a few American machines are now being introduced.

The wire fence is not yet come into Norway, although timber is remote and costly, and the people are hard put to it for fencing material. I noticed that they generally depend upon slim poles and small saplings loosely strung together, for English hedges cannot be grown in these chilly northlands.

And now we are at Skogstad, above the Vangsmjoesen Vand and lesser Strande Vand, with two or more vands to see to-morrow before we cross the height of land and come down to Laerdalsoeren, on the Sogne Fjord which holds the waters of the sea, sixty-five miles further on. The vands to-day have been like giant steps, each emptying into the one below by the roaring river, mounting up, each smaller than the one below and more pent in by towering mountain masses.

H is now tucked in between mattress and coverlet of eider down – we are beyond the latitude of blankets – in a narrow bed, and I am about to get into another on the other side of the room, on which I now sit writing to you by the light of a sperm candle, while the murmur of a thousand cascades tinkles in my ears.

VIII

Over the Height of Land – A Wonderful Ride Down the Laera Dal to the Sogne Fjord