The Charm of Scandinavia :: PHILLIPS WRITES OF SWEDEN AND FINLAND FIRST LETTER

PHILLIPS WRITES OF SWEDEN AND FINLAND FIRST LETTER

In which Phillips descants on his route to Scandinavia from Berlin; on the gastronomic delights of a Swedish railway restaurant; on the lavish comfort and economy as well as the safety of travel in Sweden; on the quiet charms of the scenery in southern Sweden, as well as on the well-earned social position and independence of the Swedish farmer.

Stockholm, January 1.

My dear Judicia,

You have brought this upon yourself, you know, for it was your proposition that Aylmer and I should try to make you feel the charm of Scandinavia as we have felt it. But do not suppose that we are going to enter upon a contest of wits in order to make our respective countries shine upon the written page, or that we are going to indulge in high-flown descriptions. We shall try to tell you of things as we see them; of the peasant in his low-thatched roof, who is as interesting as the king in his palace. We may not even think it beneath our dignity to tell you of the SmÖrgÅsbÖrd, and of the different kinds of cheese of many colors which grace the breakfast table, for all these different, homely, commonplace things enter into the spell of Scandinavia.

As you know, we started on this long northern journey at Berlin. This trip has been robbed of all its terrors, since keen competition has compelled the railway and steamboat companies to exchange the little Dampfschiff, little bigger than tugboats, which used to connect Germany with Scandinavia, for great ferry steamers, which take within their capacious maws whole railway trains, so that now we can go to sleep in Berlin, in a very comfortable sofwagn, and wake up the next morning on Swedish soil, with no consciousness of the fact that in the middle of the night we had a four hours’ voyage across a bit of blue sea which is often as stormy as the broad Atlantic itself.

You remember that I wrote you about a former journey across this same bit of water during an equinoctial gale, how our boat was tossed about like a cork, how the port was stove in, and I was washed out of my bunk. Well, last night I was reminded of that former journey by contrast, for I never knew when we were trundled aboard ship at Sassnitz, or when we were trundled on to dry land again at Trelleborg. I was sorry to cross the island of RÜgen in the night, for this bit of wind-swept, sea-washed land will always be associated for us with “Elizabeth” and her adventures, though to be sure her German garden was not on RÜgen, but on the mainland near by.

However, if I did not know when we passed from Germany to Sweden, it was very evident that we were in a different country when the window curtain was raised in the morning, and the porter informed me deferentially, in his musical Swedish voice, that “caffe and SmÖrbrÖd” would be served in the compartment if I wished. Everything is different here. This little four hours’ voyage in the middle of the night seems to have put a wide ocean between the experiences of to-day and yesterday. The brick houses are exchanged for wooden ones. The pine trees which abound in the sandy wastes north of Berlin have been exchanged for graceful white birches, sprinkled with spruce and fir. Instead of the gutturals of the south we hear the open, flowing vowels of the north. Even the signs with which the railway stations are so abundantly plastered that one has difficulty in finding their names, are different from those in Germany, and our attention is called to wholly different brands of beer, whisky, and margarine.

One thing you will rejoice in, I am sure, Judicia, and that is, that I am assured by every responsible authority that railway accidents are almost unknown in Sweden, or at least that the risk is quite infinitesimal. It is said that even in America, which has such an evil reputation for railway smashups, you can travel by rail on the average a distance one hundred and fifty-six times around the world without getting a scratch. I wonder how many thousands of times one would have to travel twenty-five thousand miles in Sweden before the train would run off the track or bump into another train. One would think that the railway accident insurance companies in Sweden would get very little business.

I concluded not to accept the porter’s kind invitation to “caffe and SmÖrbrÖd,” for I wanted to indulge at the first opportunity in a genuine Swedish railway restaurant. Think of anticipating with pleasure a railway restaurant breakfast in America or England!

I waited for breakfast until we reached Alfvesta, well on toward noon, and then made the most of the twenty-five minutes generously allowed for refreshments. “Can this be a railway restaurant?” a stranger would say to himself. Here is a bountifully filled table covered with all sorts of viands, fish, flesh, and fowl, and good red herring besides. And around this tempting table a number of gentlemen, hats and overcoats laid aside, are wandering nonchalantly, as though they had the whole day at their disposal; picking up here a ball of golden butter and there a delicate morsel of cheese; from another dish a sardine, or a slice of tongue or cold roast beef, or possibly some appetizing salad. If you would do in Sweden as the Swedes do and not declare your foreign extraction, you, too, will wander around this table in a most careless and casual way, and, when you have heaped your plate with the fat of the land, and spread a piece of crisp rye flatbread thick with fresh and fragrant butter, when you have poured out a cup of delicious coffee reduced to exactly the right shade of amber by abundant cream, then you take your spoil to a side table near by and try to feel as much at leisure in eating it as your Swedish fellow passengers appear to be.

But this is only the beginning. This is just to whet the appetite for what is to come. I counted twenty-seven different dishes on the SmÖrgÅsbÖrd table from which one might choose; or one might take something from each of the twenty-seven if he so desired. Then comes the real meal: fish and potatoes, meat and vegetables of several different kinds, salad, puddings, and cheese—and to all of these viands you help yourself. No officious waiter hovers over you, impatient for your order and eager to snatch away your plate before the last mouthful is finished, an eagerness only equaled by his rapacious desire for the expected tip. No, the only official in the room is the modest young lady who sits at a table in the far corner, and who seems to take no notice of your coming and going. If you get up a dozen times to help yourself from either end of the table; if you pour out half a dozen cups of coffee, or indulge in a quart of milk from the capacious pitchers, it seems to be no concern of hers. Her only duty is to sit behind the table and take your money when you get through, and a very small amount she takes at that.

If you have “put a knife to your throat,” and have contented yourself with coffee and cakes, the charge will be fifty Öre, or thirteen and a half cents. If you have helped yourself, however liberally, only from the cold dishes, the SmÖrgÅsbÖrd, the charge will be seventy-five Öre, or twenty cents, while even the most extravagant meal, where everything hot and cold is sampled, would be but two kronor, or a trifle over fifty cents.

I shall not tell you, Judicia, how much I paid for that particular breakfast, for I know that your first remark would be: “All that in twenty-five minutes, and you a Fletcherite!”

What strikes the uninitiated traveler with wonder and amaze on reaching Sweden is the lavishness of everything and its cheapness. On this table in Alfvesta, for instance, there were great mounds of butter nearly a foot high, instead of the little minute dabs that we see on most continental tables, with which you are supposed to merely smear your bread. The big joints of beef, the great legs of mutton, the bright silver pudding dishes of capacious size, all seem to say to the tourist: “Help yourself, and don’t be stingy.” But elegance is not sacrificed to abundance. Everything is neat and clean. The silver is polished to the last degree. The glasses are crystal clear. You do not have to scrub your plate with your napkin, as is the custom at some continental hotels, and the cooking is as delicious as the food is abundant.

Am I dwelling too long upon these merely temporal and gastronomic features of Sweden? Do you remind me that the charm of a country does not depend upon what we shall eat or what we shall drink? I reply that the first thing for a traveler, like an army, to consider, is the base of supplies. What famous general was that who made the immortal remark that every army marched upon its stomach? Why is not that equally true of a traveler?

But though the dinner table is one of the initial experiences in Sweden, it does not often need to be described. Ex uno disce omnes, and from this one meal you may learn what to expect from Trelleborg on the south to RiksgrÄnsen, some twelve hundred miles farther north, the Dan and Beersheba of Sweden. At every stopping-place, large or small, which the railway time-table kindly marks with a diminutive knife and fork, to show that the needs of the inner man are here met, you will find just such lavish, well-cooked, moderate-priced refreshments. Indeed the favorite English phrase, “cheap and nahsty”, has no equivalent in Swedish, for there is no such thing known. Cheapness does not imply poor quality or slatternly service.

You are reminded of this fact even before you leave Berlin, for a sleeping-car berth which costs more than twelve marks, something over three dollars on the south side of Berlin, costs for a longer distance on the north side, since most of the journey is to be in Sweden, less than six marks, or not quite one half as much, while the compartments are even more comfortable and better fitted. Yes, dear Judicia, Scandinavia is the country for you and me to travel in as well as for the very few other Americans, who, according to European notions, are not millionaires.

When I took my seat again after breakfast at Alfvesta, in the comfortable second-class compartment, we were soon flying, as rapidly as Swedish trains ever fly, which is rarely more than thirty miles an hour, through the heart of southern Sweden, and I had time to refresh my memory concerning this great Scandinavian peninsula, which, as some people think, hangs like a huge icicle from the roof of the world. The icicle idea, however, is entirely erroneous, so far at least as the southern part of Sweden and Norway go. The average temperature is about that of Washington, though it is cooler in summer; and very often in the neighborhood of the west coast, where the Gulf Stream, that mighty wizard of the Atlantic, does its work, there is little snow or ice from one year’s end to another.

This southern section of Sweden is called Gothland, or, literally, the Land of the Gota or Goths, a name which we always couple with the Vandals. Indeed, one of the titles by which the King of Sweden is still addressed at his coronation is “Lord of the Goths and Vandals.” Truly these old Goths and Vandals were the “scourge of God”, as Attila their leader was called, when they sailed away in their great viking ships, carrying their conquests as far as the Pillars of Hercules, and founding colonies and kingdoms along all the shores of Europe, and even across the Mediterranean, in Africa.

Scandinavia, when judged by its square miles, is certainly no mean country. Sweden alone, which claims a little more than half of the great peninsula, is as large as France or Germany, and half as large again as all Great Britain. If we should compare Sweden with some of our own more familiar boundaries, we should see that it is a little larger than California, and not unlike that Golden State in its geographical outlines. We should see also that it is about three times as large as all New England, and more than three times as large as Illinois.

Skikjoring, a Highly Enjoyable Sport.

Skate Sailing, a Favorite Sport in Sweden.

Before I finish this journey I shall have a realizing sense of Sweden’s long-drawn-out provinces, for it takes nearly sixty hours of continuous railway travel to go even as far north as the railway will carry us.

Gothland in the south, Svealand in the center, and Norrland in the north are the three great divisions of Sweden, the latter larger than the other two put together.

From the car window I see many charming sights, even in this wintry season. Indeed I am not sure that Sweden is not quite as lovely in winter as in summer. The red farmhouses, half buried in snow (for the winter is more severe now that we are getting away from the coast); the great stacks of hay that enable the patient cows to chew the cud contentedly through the long winter days; the splendid forests of white birch, the most graceful tree that grows; the ice-locked lakes, and the rushing streamlets that are making their way to the Baltic—all these combine to give us a landscape which is charming in the extreme.

I suppose that Aylmer will surfeit you with eloquent descriptions of far-reaching fjords, mighty mountains, and abysmal caÑons when he comes to write about his beloved Norway, but I am sure he will find nothing more peacefully lovely and harmonious than the farmlands of southern and central Sweden. These are the lands, too, which raise not only grass and turnips and sugar beets, but a grand crop of men and women, who are the very backbone of the Swedish commonwealth. More than eighty-five per cent of the land is owned and farmed by its proprietors, and mostly small proprietors at that. Absentee landlordism is little known. A country whose people thus have their roots in the soil has little fear from anarchists and revolutionists.

These peasant proprietors, as they are called, are by no means the dense yokels with which we associate the word “peasant” in many parts of Europe. The peasants of Sweden are simply farmers, and not always small farmers at that, for they sometimes own hundreds of acres. They are farmers who enjoy the daily newspapers and the monthly magazines, whose children all go to school, and who can aspire to the university for their sons and daughters, if they so elect. They are farmers who hold the balance of power among the law-makers of Sweden, and who always have a hundred or more of their own number in the Riksdag, some of whom are among the best orators and debaters in the Assembly. They know that no important piece of legislation to which they are opposed can ever be enacted in Sweden, and they are as proud as the nobility itself of their ancient history, and more tenacious of their ancient privileges.

Honorable W. W. Thomas, for many years the American Minister to Sweden and Norway, and who has written entertainingly concerning the people of the country, which he came to consider his adopted land, tells a good story that illustrates the independence of the Swedish peasant. It is worth quoting to you, as the train rushes by hundreds of just such peasant homes.

“Clad in homespun, and driving a rough farm wagon, this peasant pulled up at a post station in the west of Sweden. There were but two horses left in the stable, and these he immediately ordered to be harnessed into his wagon. Just as they were being hitched up, there rattled into the courtyard in great style the grand equipage of the Governor of the Province, with coachman and footman in livery. Learning the state of affairs, and wishing to avoid a long and weary delay, the coachman ordered these two horses to be taken from the peasant’s cart and harnessed into the Governor’s carriage, but the peasant stoutly refused to allow this to be done.

“‘What,’ said the Governor, ‘do you refuse to permit those horses to be harnessed into my carriage?’

“‘Yes, I do,’ said the peasant.

“‘And do you know who I am,’ quoth the Governor, somewhat in a rage; ‘I am the Governor of this Province; a Knight of the Royal Order of the North Star, and one of the chamberlains of his Majesty the King.’

“‘Oh ho,’ said the peasant, ‘and do you, sir, know who I am?’

“He said this in such a bold and defiant manner that the Governor was somewhat taken aback. He began to think that the fellow might be some great personage after all, some prince perhaps, traveling in disguise.

“‘No,’ said he in an irresolute voice, ‘I do not know who you are. Who are you?’

“‘Well,’ replied the peasant, walking up to him and looking him firmly in the eye, ‘I’ll tell you who I am—I am the man that ordered those horses!’

“After this there was nothing more to be said. The peasant quietly drove away on his journey, and the Governor waited until such time as he could legally procure fresh means of locomotion.”

As I said, I thought of this characteristic story of peasant independence as my train sped by many a comfortable farmhouse, whose occupants, I have no doubt, would defy the authority of the governor, or of the king himself, if he should attempt to trample upon their rights.

But we are now drawing near to Sweden’s capital, and perhaps you will think that this letter is quite long enough for my first promised installment concerning the charms of Sweden.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

SECOND LETTER

In which Phillips lauds Stockholm as the most beautiful of European cities; tells the tragic story of the royal palace; remarks casually upon the superabundance of telephones, for which Stockholm is famous; describes the Riksdag and the medieval ceremony of opening Parliament, and comments briefly on the relations of Church and State in Sweden.

Stockholm, January 3.

My dear Judicia,

When last I wrote you, if I remember rightly, I was just approaching Stockholm, after the six-hundred-mile journey from Berlin. It was quite dark, and for that I was not sorry, for Stockholm is so brilliantly lighted that it is almost as beautiful by night as by day. As we approached, the many quays, from which scores of little steamers are constantly darting to and fro, were all picked out by globes of electric light. Old Stockholm, climbing the hill to the left, looked like a constellation of stars in the bright heavens, and the occasional glimpses of broad streets which one gets as he approaches the central station were flooded with the soft glow of the incandescent burners. Nevertheless, beautiful as was the night scene, I was quite impatient for the morning light to reveal the glories of the most beautiful capital of Europe, which I remembered so well, but was none the less anxious to see again.

“The most beautiful capital in Europe!” did I hear you say, Judicia, with a suspicion of skepticism in your rising inflection? “Have you forgotten Paris, and Rome, and Budapest, and Vienna? Are you not somewhat carried away by your desire to make out a good case for Sweden?” No, I cannot plead guilty to any of these charges, which I am sure are lurking in your mind, for ever since my first visit, years ago, I have considered Stockholm, for beauty of situation, for freshness and vigor, and (though this might be disputed) a certain originality of architecture, not only in the first rank of cities, but the first in the first rank. To be sure, it is not as large as many another city, but bigness is not beauty. It has not the picture galleries of Florence, or the antiquities of London, or the palaces of Paris, but it has charms all its own, which, in my opinion, weave about it a spell which no other city possesses.

The morning light did not dissipate the impressions of the evening before, nor the happy memories of the past, for I found that Stockholm had improved in its architecture since my last visit, though its glorious situation can never be improved.

Through half a dozen different channels the waters of the great lake MÄlar rush to join the Baltic, for, though the lake is only eighteen inches above the sea, so great is the volume of water that it is always pressing through the narrow channels in swirls and eddies, and it dances forward with an eager joy that gives one a sense of marvelous life and abounding vigor and seems to impart its character to the whole city. Around the city on one side are the stern, fir-clad promontories, the great lake and the black forests to the west, and one can seem to step from the heart of nature’s wilds into the heart of the most advanced civilization. Out toward the Baltic on the east is an archipelago forty miles in length, dotted with islands and headlands, smiling and peaceful in summer, ice-bound and storm-lashed in the winter, but equally beautiful in January or June.

The first building that strikes the eye is naturally the royal palace, which, I must say, to republican eyes, looks square and somber and lacking in ornamentation, but which connoisseurs in palaces say is one of the most beautiful in Europe.

Do you remember my writing you some years ago about my interview with good King Oscar in this old palace? After waiting in the public reception room for a little while I was announced by the lord chamberlain and stepped into a little room leading off the large reception hall, and there, all alone, stood a very tall and very handsome man in a light blue military uniform, with two or three jeweled decorations on his breast. This was Oscar II, by the grace of God, King of Sweden and Norway, of the Goths and Vandals. He bowed and smiled with a most winning and gracious expression, and, coming forward, took me by the hand and led me to a seat on one side of a small table, on the other side of which he seated himself. I do not think it was the glamour of royalty that dazzled my eyes when I wrote of his winning smile. Many others have spoken of his charm of manner, and he was noted as being the most courtly, affable, and gracious monarch that sat upon any throne of Europe.

But alas, the good king has died since my last visit to Stockholm, his later years being embittered by the partition of his kingdom, when Norway decided to set up a king of her own. But though kings may come and kings may go, the grim old palace which has harbored all the rulers of Sweden for eight hundred years still stands on the banks of the tumultuous MÄlar.

When the palace was rebuilt, or restored, some two hundred and twenty years ago, it was the scene of a most tragic event. In 1692 Charles XI decided that it was time to remodel the old home of the Swedish kings, which had already stood upon that spot for six centuries. He commanded Tessin, a great architect, who has left his impress upon Stockholm and all Sweden, to rebuild the palace. Accordingly the architect traveled in Italy and France and England to make a study of the best palaces he could find. When his plans were completed, he showed them to Louis XIV of France, who was so much pleased with them that he commanded his ambassador to Sweden to congratulate Charles XI “on this beautiful edifice he was proposing to erect.”

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

The Royal Palace, Stockholm.

But Charles XI never lived to see the plans carried out. He died after the work had been well begun, and when the scaffoldings surrounded the palace on every side. The work of reconstruction was of course interrupted while the king’s body was lying in state, but just before the funeral procession moved out of the palace a fire broke out, and the whole edifice was destroyed, save the great walls, which are standing to this day. With extreme difficulty the king’s body was saved and carried into the royal stables, where his grandson, a lad fifteen years of age, who was destined to become Charles XII, one of the most famous kings of Sweden, had taken refuge.

A picture in the National Museum makes the scene live over again: the old queen, frightened by the double catastrophe; the boy king, helping his frightened grandmother down the steps, while the tongues of fire leap out at them from behind; the courtiers in hot haste carrying the coffin of the old king, while the little princesses look on with childish interest, scarcely realizing the gravity of the situation.

Again the great architect had to go to work on his task, so sadly interrupted. For thirty years it was pursued, during the days of Sweden’s greatest poverty, and only in 1754, nearly sixty years after Tessin began his work of rebuilding, was it completed, and nearly thirty years after the death of the master builder.

The palace has at least the merit of commodiousness, for we are told that “when King Oscar celebrated his Jubilee in 1897, all his guests, including more than twenty princes and half as many princesses, belonging to all the thrones of Europe, were lodged there with their numerous suites.”

But your republican soul, Judicia, will be more interested in some of the other buildings of Stockholm, perhaps even in the hideous excrescence which towers up above the roofs of the houses, and which shows us where the telephone exchange is situated, to which ten thousand wires, more or less (I did not count them), converge. I should think, however, that it would require at least ten thousand wires to satisfy the rapacious demands of the Stockholmers for telephone service. Every hotel room, even in the modest hostelries, has one, and most of them have two telephones, a city telephone and a long-distance one.

In every little park and open space are two telephone booths, for long and short distances. Stockholm, with a population about the twentieth part of greater London, has nearly twice as many telephones as the British metropolis, and the service is always prompt, cheap, and obliging.

Then there is the great Lift, a conspicuous feature of Old Stockholm, which hoists passengers in a jiffy from the level of the Baltic to the heights of the old town. That, too, would interest you, Judicia, for I remember your strenuous objections to hill-climbing.

To turn from structures, useful but hideous, to one more beautiful, and, shall I say, less useful? there is the Riksdag, a modern building of very handsome and generous proportions, where the law-makers of Sweden assemble, and where, I suppose, rival parties fire hot shot at one another as freely as they do in Washington or London. Every year the Swedish parliament meets in the middle of January and closes its sessions on the fifteenth of May, and this is the one place which the king may not enter, as one of the guardians of the Riksdag proudly informed me. Both houses of Parliament go to him, but he may not return to them. At the opening of Parliament, the legislators assemble in the palace, where the king addresses them, and the medieval ceremony connected with this function is worth telling you about.

After prayers and a special sermon in the cathedral relating to the duties of legislation (a religious custom that reminds us of the old Election Day Sermon of the good State of Massachusetts, a custom now unhappily abolished), the members of the upper and lower houses march into a great hall in the palace, the speakers of the two houses leading the way, and take their seats on either side of the throne. This throne is of solid silver, on a raised platform, and on either side of it are seats for the princes and members of the royal family. The queen and princesses sit in the gallery, surrounded by members of the court. “All sorts and conditions of men are represented—bishops and country clergymen, provincial governors and landed noblemen, freehold peasants, rural schoolmasters, university dons, and industrial kings.”

We are reminded of the past history of Sweden by the uniforms of the military guards, some of whom are in the costume of Charles XII, and others in that of Gustavus III. The courtiers are arrayed in gorgeous uniforms, and their breasts blaze with their many decorations. After the guard and the gentlemen-in-waiting come the princes, in the march to the throne room, and last of all the king himself. He seats himself upon the throne and commences his address, which always begins with the words, “Good Sirs and Swedish Men” and ends with his assurance of good will to all.

The presidents of the two houses respond to the speech of the king. The heads of the departments read their reports and present their budgets. Then, the stately ceremony being over, the gorgeous procession files out in the same order in which it came in, and the two houses proceed to the Parliament Building to begin the work of the new session.

If the fad that prevailed among our novelists a few years ago in finding titles for their stories should ever reach Sweden, I am sure that there would be a novel called “The Man from Dalecarlia,” for he is certainly the most picturesque figure in the Riksdag. In the midst of the sober, black coats and white shirt fronts and patent-leather shoes and top hats, he stands out like a very bird of paradise in his navy blue coat, trimmed with red piping, bright red waistcoat, knee breeches tied with heavy tassels, and bright shoe-buckles. He might have stepped into the Riksdag out of the century before last. But I am glad he has not discarded his national costume, and, whenever I see a Dalecarlian girl on the street in her bright striped apron and piquant cap (and these girls often seek service in Stockholm), I am again grateful for the bit of color which they bring into the gray, wintry streets.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

Tea House on Banks of MÄlar. In the distance, the Grand Hotel, Stockholm.

Most of the Swedes are decidedly conventional in their costume in these days, and you see more shiny beavers and Prince Albert coats than you would in the streets of London, though it cannot be said that Swedes despise brilliant uniforms on state occasions. At such times the diplomatic representatives of the United States look like crows in a flock of peacocks.

While I am writing you about the government and the court, let me tell you a few words about the church, for Church and State are very closely connected in Sweden. To be sure, there are many free churches—Independent (or Congregational), Baptist, and Methodist—but the prevailing religion, to which I suppose three fourths of the people in the country adhere, is the State Lutheran Church. There are some exceedingly fine churches in Stockholm, though, considering the size of the city, it strikes a visitor that there are surprisingly few. Some of the parishes are very large, and contain twenty or thirty thousand nominal adherents. The Church of the Knights is perhaps the most interesting one, where many of the kings of Sweden, even down to our own time, are buried.

The parish priest is appointed by the king, or consistory, at least nominally, and is paid out of the taxes. Yet there is a good degree of self-government in the churches, for the parish elects the boards of administration of church affairs, and even votes on ministerial candidates. Each candidate has to preach a trial sermon before the congregation, while the king, if it is a royal benefice, as many of the churches are, appoints one of the three candidates who receive the highest number of votes, usually appointing the one who is the candidate of the majority.

It must be even a more trying thing to “candidate” in Sweden than in America, for here it is frankly admitted that the preacher and his sermon are on trial, and there is no polite fiction about an exchange with a brother minister, with a suggestion that the health of the candidate’s wife requires a change of parishes.

I had it in mind, Judicia, to tell you in this letter about certain things less lofty than affairs of Church and State, but must reserve the story for another epistle.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

THIRD LETTER

In which Phillips suggests that Stockholm should be called the “Automatic City”; describes the queer statistical animals, called “unified cattle”; extracts some interesting facts from the census; does not consider the stores or the bathtubs beneath his notice; treats of the effective temperance legislation of Sweden, and tells why a fire is so rare an excitement in Stockholm.

Stockholm, January 7.

My dear Judicia,

You know how our American cities often strain themselves to find an appropriate name or nickname by which they shall be known among their sister municipalities. Stockholm is certainly the “Queen City of the North,” and is deserving of any other high-flown title you have a mind to give her. But if we descend to more prosaic designations, we might well call it the “Automatic City.” Nowhere in the world can you drop a penny in the slot and get so much back for it as you can in Stockholm.

The automobile, which abounds everywhere, is an automatic machine which registers in its taximeter the distance run, and thus avoids all disputes with the chauffeur. The telephones, whose little green pagodas dot the city in every direction, are also penny-in-the-slot affairs, and you can talk, as I think I have already told you, with any town on the map of Scandinavia for a very reasonable sum.

But when it comes time for frokost (breakfast), or middag (dinner), then the automat is very much in evidence. It seems at first to the traveler that the keeping of automat restaurants is the chief business in Stockholm, for we find one at almost every corner. Drop a ten Öre piece in the slot, and, according to your choice of viands, a glass of milk, a cup of tea or coffee, a cheese sandwich, a sausage, or a boiled egg drops out of the spout. Or, if you wish a more extravagant meal, twenty-five Öre (about seven cents) will give you your choice of a dozen hot dishes. One writer with a sense of humor speaks of such establishments as I have described as the “rich man’s automat,” but he is not far from wrong when you compare this establishment with the little wooden buildings which you see in the market squares and along the docks of Stockholm, for this is the automat reduced to its lowest terms for cheapness and simplicity. There is no apparent opening in this wooden box, but a shelf runs around it, and large cups are chained to it, with a tap in the wall at every few feet. Inside is a tank of hot milk. The marketmen drop a five Öre piece (a trifle over a cent) into the slot, and out runs nearly a pint of rich, hot milk. No wonder that there are enough cattle to give every man, woman, and child in Sweden on the average one milch cow, or else the “poor man’s automat” could never be maintained at any such figures.

The process of arithmetic, however, by which this milch cow is allotted to every man, woman, and child, is interesting and peculiar, since for the purpose of comparative statistics the Swedish Bureau has invented fictitious animals called “unified cattle.” This is explained by Mr. Sundbarg in his Swedish Land and Folk as follows: The milch cow is the unit, and all other animals the multiples. For instance, a horse is equal to a cow and a third; a sheep is reckoned as a tenth of a cow; a goat as only a twelfth of a cow, while it takes four pigs to make a cow. I cannot for the life of me see why a pig should be worth two and a half sheep; can you? A reindeer is only worth a fifth of a cow, which seems to me altogether too small a value to put upon these indispensable animals of snowland.

Well, the result is that in the last census which is available to me Sweden possessed something over five millions of these composite animals called “unified cattle,” and, as I before told you, every mother’s son and daughter in Sweden, on the average, possesses one milch cow, or it may be three quarters of a horse, ten sheep, twelve goats, four pigs, or five and a half reindeer. If I were a Swede I think I would choose to have my share in reindeer.

While we are dealing with statistics, Judicia, let us have it out and squeeze the census dry of interesting facts and be done with it. How many wealthy persons do you suppose there are among the five and a half millions of Swedes who have not yet crossed the Atlantic to seek a home in the New World? Well, if at your leisure you can find out what 13.75 per cent of five and a half millions is you will know exactly the number of people that can be called “wealthy.” It would not be far from seven hundred thousand. Then in “easy” circumstances we find sixty-seven per cent of the people, or about three and a half millions. In “straightened” circumstances there are rather more than could be called wealthy, while we find that there are only about three per cent of the people who are in genuine poverty and have to receive help from the State or from their richer neighbors.

I think these statistics speak exceedingly well, for the Swedes. Agur’s prayer, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me,” seems to have been answered for them. Even those in wealthy circumstances are not so enormously rich that they are in danger of losing heaven by such a burden of wealth as would prevent the camel from passing through the eye of the needle.

Since I have told you how many cows, how many fractions of a pig or of a reindeer every Swede possesses, you may also be glad to know that if all the land were divided up evenly every old grandam and every baby in the cradle would have twenty and a half acres. Only two and a quarter acres of these are under cultivation, but he would have nearly ten acres of woodland, which would surely furnish him with enough fuel, while his seven and a half acres of uncultivated land would furnish plenty of pasturage for his cow, or his three-quarters of a horse.

Speaking of fuel, I must launch into a mild eulogy of these Swedish stoves. Even Aylmer will admit that they are better than the air-tight, iron monstrosities which they have in Norway, and in America too, for that matter, where “central heating” has not replaced them. These Swedish stoves are much like the German porcelain heaters, only they are built on a more generous scale. They occupy a whole corner of the room, and often extend from floor to ceiling. Usually they are of white porcelain, though often other colored tiles are used, and sometimes they are highly ornamented with cupids or dragons, or like allegorical animals.

In the morning, quite early, the pretty chambermaid makes a fire of short birch sticks, filling the firebox up to the top. Then the drafts must be left open until all the gases and smoke have escaped, which have such a tortuous course to travel through the many pipes concealed within the porcelain that gradually they heat the great white monument through and through. When the birch is reduced to living coals, the dampers are shut off; the heat is thus retained, and a genial warmth is given out for the rest of the day. Even at night the tilings of the stove are quite warm, and you seldom want more than one “heating” in the course of the twenty-four hours, except in the most extreme weather.

After this little excursion into stoveland, let me return for a moment to our fascinating statistics. It is said that the Swedes are the longest-lived people in the world, and within a hundred years they have reduced the death rate nearly one half. I wonder if this low death rate is not due in part to their cleanly habits. I suppose the fresh, northern mountain air, crisp and frosty in the winter, and the out-of-door life which a people largely agricultural live has much to do with it, but I am also inclined to think that their love of the prosaic bathtub is partly responsible, for I suppose that the Scandinavians, with the exception of the Japanese, and perhaps the Finns, are the cleanliest people in the world.

I have seen a funny picture which represents a school bath. It is a photograph, too. Here is a big school bathroom with a dozen tubs shaped like washtubs setting on the floor, each one occupied by a sturdy little youngster of some ten summers. Each one is industriously scrubbing the back of his next neighbor, while he is immersed up to his middle in the warm water. Over each boy’s head is a shower bath, and if friendly competition does not make the back of each of those boys immaculate I do not know how cleanliness can be achieved.

However much the school tub may have to do with the longevity of the Swede, I know that the blue ribboners would ascribe the increasing span of his years to the temperance law which the last parliamentary half-century has seen enacted and enforced. Sweden once had the sad reputation of being the most drunken country in Europe, and no wonder, for in 1775 Gustavus III made liquor selling and liquor making a State monopoly, and much revenue was derived from intoxicating fluids. The heaviest drinker was the greatest benefactor of the State, for he was thus adding with every dram to the public revenues. Tea and coffee were shut out of the country by the laws, lest some poor toper should prefer them. Beer even was unknown, and wine was rare and costly.

Who do you think was the first man to protest against this wholesale drunkard making? It was no other than LinnÆus, the gentle botanist, to whom the world is indebted for naming more plants than Adam ever named. He tried to convince the people of the awful effects of alcoholism upon the national life. After about a decade and a half the government became ashamed of itself and abolished its monopoly. But then things went from bad to worse, for the making and selling of liquor became absolutely free. Everybody who had a little grain made it into whisky. Every large farm had its distillery, and to make drunkards became, not the business of the State, but of everybody who wished to make money.

Thus things went on for some forty years, when the Neal Dow, or more properly the Father Matthew of Sweden, came to the front. This was Canon Wieselgren, who in 1830 began to write and lecture against this awful national evil, and at last, aided by famous men of science, who made exhaustive studies of alcoholism, he brought about a complete and blessed reform in the liquor laws. The tax on whisky was raised so high that private individuals could neither make nor sell it. Local option was allowed, and many communities forbade altogether the sale of liquor. At last the famous Gothenburg system was adopted, and “the monopoly of the manufacture and sale of spirits was given to a company which is allowed to make only a fair rate of interest out of the capital employed, and must hand over the surplus to the community, to be used in the support of such institutions as may tend to diminish the consumption of liquor and combat drunkenness.” The company is guaranteed five per cent on its capital should the sale fall below a certain minimum. This system has the great advantage that it precludes all desire on the part of the company and its retail sellers to increase the sale of drink, as the interest on the capital employed is secured and is not liable to be increased by a larger output.

There are various other regulations which are of interest to all in our country, since the liquor problem is always a burning question. The retail seller must provide food as well as drink, and is not allowed to sell liquor without food, and then only in a small glass to each customer. Youths under eighteen years of age cannot buy, and the retail shops must close at six o’clock. The profits that are made by the company must be used in providing rooms, free libraries, lectures, sports, and games, and it is said that the visitors to the seven reading rooms thus provided in Gothenburg reach half a million every year. Now Sweden and Norway are the most temperate countries in Europe. A drunken man is a rara avis. Crime has diminished in like proportion, as is to be expected.

Let me tell you of one more Swedish phenomenon before I close this letter. During all this visit to Stockholm, and in my previous visits as well, I have never seen a fire engine go tearing through the streets, though one could hardly live for a day in Boston or New York without such an excitement. And yet they have fire engines and horses ready harnessed day and night in Stockholm, and men sleeping in their boots ready to drop down through a hole in the floor on to their seat on the fire engine at any moment. One would think that the men would get tired of waiting for an event that so seldom happens, and that the horses would die for lack of exercise, as they undoubtedly would if they had to wait for a fire to give them a good run.

Do you want to know, Judicia, why the excitement of a fire is so rare in Stockholm? I will tell you, as my friend, Mr. Thomas, the ex-Minister to Sweden, has told me. “Once a year, if you live here, two gentlemen will call on you with book and pencil in hand and carefully examine every stove in your rooms. They also examine all the flues and chimneys. They are officers of the municipality, and the patriarchal government of Stockholm wishes to see that there is no danger of your burning yourself up.”

If they find that your chimneys are foul, a little boy with a sooty face, with white teeth and eyeballs shining through the grime, will wait on you. He will have a rope wound around his neck, with an iron hook on the end, and you must let him go down your chimney and clean out all the soot and cinders. You must also comply with twelve regulations when you build your house, which relate to the material for the walls and the roof, the construction of the cellar, etc., and the house must not be more than sixty-eight feet high. If you think these regulations are too severe, they will at least reduce the size of your insurance bill, for $1.25 will insure your house for $2500 for a year; that is, the premium is a twentieth of one per cent—less than a quarter part of what it would be in America. For $17.50 you may insure your house forever for $1000. If it stands for two hundred years you will never have to pay another cent; so you see there are some advantages, even if there are some annoyances, in a paternal government.

I know your aversion to statistics, my dear Judicia, and in spite of their proverbial dullness it does seem to me rather necessary for one who would feel the deepest charm of Sweden to know something about the characteristics of the Swedes and their comparative standing in matters material and moral with the other nations of Europe. But since, in an early letter, these matters have been disposed of, I can promise you in my next something to which your romantic soul will respond more generously.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

FOURTH LETTER

Wherein Phillips tells of the many beautiful excursions from Stockholm, and soon takes Judicia into the heart of Dalecarlia, noted for the fertility of its soil and the bright costumes of its maidens. He also rehearses the romantic story of Gustavus Vasa, involving the treacherous cruelty of Christian II and the many hairbreadth escapes of Gustavus, until he roused the Swedes to fight for and win their freedom.

Mora, Dalecarlia, January 10.

My Dear Judicia,

I told you in a former letter, did I not, about the pretty maidens from Dalecarlia whom one often meets in their bright costumes on the streets of Stockholm, as well as the “Member from Dalecarlia,” who relieves the solemn monotony of the Riksdag with his ancient provincial costume. Attracted by these brilliant birds of passage, I am going to take you to-day to the very heart of Dalecarlia, where they live, for it is the most interesting province in all Sweden.

Stockholm has the distinct advantage, not only of being a most interesting city in itself, but of being a center from which you can easily make excursions to any part of Scandinavia, east or west, or north or south; and, believe me, in whichever direction you start you will have no regrets that you did not take some other excursion, for each one has its own peculiar fascination.

A story is told of a young English couple who came to Stockholm for their honeymoon. They thought a week would be sufficient to exhaust the attractions of the city and its environs. Without guide or guide book they started out one morning, taking one of the little steamers, not knowing or caring whither they went or where they would bring up. So delighted were they with this trip that the next day they took another, and the next still another, and so on every day for three months they made a different excursion over the waterways of Sweden, coming back to Stockholm every night; and even then they had not exhausted the possible trips. Indeed there are more than two hundred of these little steamers that ply through the canals and the lakes, and along the Baltic coast. One of the delights of Sweden is its infinite variety.

If it were summer time we would take one of these little steamers along the coast directly north to Gafle; but at this time of year it is more convenient to take the comfortable train, which in a few hours will land us in the very heart of Dalecarlia, or Dalarne, as the Swedes usually call it.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

Some Girls of Dalecarlia.

The province has many attractions. Smiling valleys, which one can see even under their blanket of snow must be abundantly productive, are frequently crossed by strong rivers rushing to the Baltic. The Dal especially is a splendid stream, while Lake Siljan, a great sheet of water in the very heart of the province, with peaceful shores sloping gently back from its blue waters on every side, adds the last touch to the sylvan scene. I am writing of it as it is in summer, but I am always in doubt whether these Swedish landscapes are more beautiful in white or green.

The quaint costumes of the Dalecarlians, as you can imagine, add immensely to the interest of the country. It is the only province of Sweden, so far as I know, that retains its ancient dress and glories in it. In some parts each parish has its own peculiar costume, and, as is natural and appropriate, the ladies are far brighter in plumage than the men.

As you know, I am not good at describing a lady’s dress. How often have you upbraided me for not being able to tell you what the bride wore? Let me then borrow the description of a connoisseur in these matters: “Bright bits of color were the maidens we met along the road. The skirts of their dresses were of some dark-blue stuff, except in front. Here, from the waist down, for the space that would be covered by an ample apron, the dress was white, black, yellow, red, and green, in transverse bars about two inches wide. Each bar was divided throughout its entire length by a narrow rib or backbone of red, and these gaudy stripes repeated themselves down to the feet. The waist of these dresses was very low, not much more than a broad belt, and above this swelled out their white chemise, covering the bust and arms, and surmounted with a narrow lace collar around the neck. Outside the collar was a gaudy kerchief, caught together on the breast by a round silver brooch with three pendants. On their heads was a black helmet of thick cloth, with a narrow red rib in the seams. The helmet rose to a point on top, and came low down in the neck behind, where depended two black bands ending in red, woolly globes that played about their shoulders. Under the helmet might be seen the edge of a white kerchief bound about their brows, and beneath the kerchief escaped floods of golden ringlets that waved above bright blue eyes and adown brown, ruddy cheeks. In cold weather the maids and the matrons also wear a short jacket of snowy sheepskin with the wool inside.”

But the greatest charm to me about Dalecarlia is not in the lovely pastoral scenery, or even in the bright costumes and brighter faces of its maidens, but in its noble, soul-stirring history, for here is where Sweden’s Independence Day dawned, and to the devout Swede every foot of the province is sacred soil.

To get fully into this tonicky, patriotic atmosphere we must go around the great lake to Mora, on its northwestern shore. Then we will walk a mile out into the country, for you will not mind a little walk through the snow on a beautiful crisp morning like this, until we come to a square, stone building, which is peculiar in having a large door but no windows. The custodian, who lives near by, unlocks the massive door, and we find on entering that what we have come to see is all underground.

Opening a trapdoor in the center of the building, our guide precedes us down half a dozen steps until we stand on the floor of a small cellar, less than ten feet square and perhaps seven feet high. Here was enacted the homely scene which was the turning point in Sweden’s history. The cackling geese that saved Rome, the spider that inspired Bruce to another heroic effort for Scotland’s freedom, were not more necessary to the story of these nations than was Margit, wife of Tomte Matts Larsson, who placed a big tubful of Christmas beer which she had been brewing over this trapdoor so that the bloodthirsty Danes, who were eagerly searching for Gustavus Vasa, never suspected that he was hidden in the cellar beneath.

But in order to understand the full significance of this rude cellar and the importance to the history of Sweden of Margit’s ready wit, we must go back to Stockholm in imagination and transport ourselves by the same ready means of conveyance back nearly four hundred years to the later months of 1520, when Christian II of Denmark, who was a Christian only in name, was crowned king of Sweden in the Church of St. Nikolaus at Stockholm.

Christian had been provoked by the opposition of the leading Swedes to the union of their country with Denmark and with their attempt to set up a king of their own. At last he determined to crush out all opposition, and with a great army he ravaged the country, conquered the provinces one after the other, and, as we have seen, was at last crowned king in Stockholm.

He appeared to be on especially good terms with the nobles of the country that he had conquered, and invited them all, together with the chief men of Stockholm and the most distinguished ecclesiastics of the country, to the great festivities connected with his coronation. Suddenly, and mightily to their amazement, they all found themselves arrested and thrown into various dungeons on the charge of treason to the king. The city was put in a state of siege. The muzzles of big guns threatened the people at every street corner. But the prisoners were not kept long in suspense. Soon the gates of the palace, in whose dungeons they were confined, were flung open and, surrounded by soldiers and assassins, they were marched to a central square.

First Bishop Matthias was brought forth. “As he knelt with hands pressed together and uplifted as in prayer, his own brother and his chancellor sprang forward to take a last farewell. But at that very moment the headsman swung his broadsword. The bishop’s head fell and rolled on the ground toward his friends, while his blood spurted from the headless trunk.”

One by one the other victims followed—twelve senators, three mayors, and fourteen of the councilors of Stockholm—until, before the sun set on that black Thursday, November 8, 1520, eighty-two of Sweden’s best and noblest men had paid the penalty of their love of freedom and their hatred of tyranny. This was but the beginning. Other outrages followed. The noble ladies of Sweden were carried off to Copenhagen and there thrown into dungeons. This massacre is called in history “Stockholm’s Blood Bath.”

The unchristian Christian by this massacre seems to have merely whetted his appetite for blood, for on his return to Denmark the next month he glutted his insane desire for the lives of his best people by many another murder.

A touching story is told of such a scene in JÖnkÖping. He beheaded Lindorn Rabbing and his two little boys, eight and six years of age. The elder son was first decapitated. “When the younger saw the flowing blood which dyed his brother’s clothes, he said to the headsman, ‘Dear Man, don’t let my shirt get all bloody like brother’s, for mother will whip me if you do.’ The childish prattle touched the heart of even the grim headsman. Flinging away his sword, he cried: ‘Sooner shall my own shirt be stained with blood than I make bloody yours, my boy.’ But the barbarous king beckoned to a more hardened butcher, who first cut off the head of the lad, and then that of the executioner who had shown mercy.”

Do you wonder, Judicia, that the hearts of the Swedes were mad with grief and anger? Yet they seemed utterly cowed, stunned, so terrible were their disasters, and it appeared impossible that help should arise from any quarter.

But Sweden’s darkest day was just before its dawn, and the one who was to accomplish her deliverance from tyrants forever was a young man four and twenty years of age. His father, Erik Johansson, was one of the noblemen whose blood reddened the streets of Stockholm on that awful November day, while his mother and sisters were carried off to languish in the dungeons of Copenhagen. Just as the ax was about to strike its fatal blow, a messenger came in hot haste from the king offering pardon to Erik Johansson, but he would not accept it from such a monster, and he cried out: “My comrades are honorable gentlemen. I will, in God’s name, die the death with them.”

His son, Gustavus, had also been summoned to Stockholm by the king; but he suspected mischief, for he had already been a wanderer for two years in the wilds of Sweden to escape Christian’s wrath, so he did not obey the order. When he heard of the massacre, he at once fled from his hiding-place on the banks of Lake MÄlar and sought refuge in Dalecarlia. Here he adopted the costume of the country as a disguise. He put on a homespun suit of clothes. He cut his hair squarely around his ears, and with a round hat, and an ax over his shoulder he started out to arouse the Swedish people to make one more last stand for liberty.

Here in beautiful Dalecarlia he had innumerable adventures. I should have to write a volume if I attempted to tell them all. On one occasion he was let down from a second-story window of a farmhouse by a long towel held by Barbro Stigsdotter, a noble Swedish woman whose husband had taken the side of the king. She deserves a place beside our own Barbara Frietchie, and I wish I were another Whittier to immortalize her. When her dastardly husband returned with twenty Danish soldiers to arrest the young nobleman, Gustavus was nowhere to be found, and we are told that Arendt Persson never forgave his wife this deed.

Another good story is told about Gustavus at Isala not far away. Here the hunted fugitive was warming himself in the little hut of Sven Elfsson, while Sven’s wife was baking bread. Just at this unlucky moment the Danish spies who were searching for him broke into the hut. But with rare presence of mind and noble patriotism, with which Swedish women seem to have been preËminently endowed, she struck him smartly on the shoulder with the long wooden shovel with which she was accustomed to pull her loaves out of the oven, at the same time shouting in a peremptory voice: “What are you standing here and gaping at? Have you never seen folks before? Out with you into the barn!”

The Danish soldiers could not believe that a peasant woman would treat a scion of the nobility like that, and concluded that after all he was not the man they were looking for. Sven himself seems to have been as patriotic as his wife, for when the soldiers had retired for a little he covered Gustavus up deep in a load of straw and drove him out farther into the forest. But the suspicious soldiers could not be so easily put off their scent, and, suspecting that there might be somebody or something of importance under the straw, they stuck their spears into it over and over again. At last, satisfied that there was nothing there, they rode on.

But soon drops of blood began to trickle through the straw upon the white snow, and in order to allay the suspicions of the Danes, who might come up with him at any moment, Sven gashed his horse’s leg, that they might suppose that the blood came from the animal and not from anything concealed in his sledge. At Isala to-day we see the barn of good Sven Elfsson, and just in front of it a monument telling of Gustavus’ hairbreadth escape. Fortunately the wounds received by him under the straw were not serious, and after many days and many adventures he reached Lake Siljan and the little village of Mora, where we first saw him concealed in Larsson’s cellar, over whose door good Margit had put her tub of Christmas beer.

Christmas Day came at last in the sad year of 1520, as it has in many a glad year since for the people of Sweden, and the Dalecarlians flocked to the church at Mora. After the church service, as they streamed along the road to their homes, a young man of noble mien suddenly mounted a heap of snow by the roadside and in burning words, made eloquent and forceful not only by his bitter indignation but by his terrible sufferings as well, he rehearsed the perfidy and cruelty of the Danes, and urged the Swedes to assert their rights as free men and save their country.

But the people were tired of fighting and overawed by the savage Christian and his myrmidons, and they begged him to leave them in peace. The poor young nobleman had exhausted his resources; he had fired his last shot, and so in despair of arousing the people to fight for freedom, since in Dalarne of all the provinces he expected to find the spirit of liberty not quite dead, he fastened his long skis on his feet, took a staff in his hand, and disappeared into the forest.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

Where Gustavus Adolphus Rests among Hard-Won Battle Flags.

Day after day he made his solitary way through the woods and over the snow fields, for he knew that the spies of Denmark were on his track. He had almost approached the borders of Norway, where he intended to seek an asylum, when he heard a sound of approaching runners, and then the glad cry, which must have sounded like music in his ears: “Come back, Gustav; we of Dalecarlia have repented. We will fight for Fatherland if you will lead us.” We can imagine how gladly he responded and how eagerly he returned with the two ski-runners to Mora. Here the people elected him “lord and chieftain over Dalarne and the whole realm of Sweden.”

As a snowball grows in size as it rolls down the hill until it becomes an irresistible avalanche, so the peasants of Sweden gathered around Gustavus, sixteen at first, then two hundred. In a month there were four hundred, and he had won his first victory at Kopparberget. There he spoiled the Egyptians and divided the spoil among his followers, which of course did not diminish his popularity. Soon the four hundred grew to fifteen hundred, and the hundreds became thousands.

But the Danes were not to give up without a struggle. Six thousand men were sent out against the patriots, who had now mustered five thousand men to oppose them on the banks of the river Dal, on the edge of the province nearest to Stockholm. The Danes were mightily surprised when told that the Swedes were so determined to win that they would live on water and bread made from the bark of trees. One of their commanders cried out: “A people who eat wood and drink water, the devil himself cannot subdue, much less any other.”

The Danes were utterly defeated, their morale very likely being affected by these terrible stories of the wood-eating Dalecarlians. Some of them were driven into the river and drowned, and the rest flew helter-skelter, broken and defeated, back to their headquarters. Of course the war was not entirely over, but the young hero knew no defeat, and finally, on June 23, 1523, on Midsummer’s Eve, which is a holiday in Sweden second only to Christmas, Gustavus Vasa, who had been unanimously elected king by the Riksdag, rode triumphantly into his nation’s capital.

He showed his religious character by going first to the cathedral, where he kneeled before the high altar and returned thanks to Almighty God; and here in my story I may well leave the man who freed his country from the Danish yoke—the George Washington of Sweden.

You are such a stanch patriot, Judicia, and such a hater of tyrants, dead or alive, that I know I need not apologize for writing somewhat at length of this glorious period in Swedish history.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

FIFTH LETTER

Wherein are described the glories of an Arctic winter; the comfort of traveling beyond the polar circle (with a brief philological excursion); the inexpressible beauties of the “European Lady of the Snows”; the unique railway station of Polcirkeln, and the regions beyond.

Kiruna, Lapland, January 15.

My dear Judicia,

I wonder if you remember how I wrote you some years ago about a journey I made toward the arctic circle in midwinter, and how enraptured I was with the still, cold days, the wonderful frosty rime on every bush and fence rail, and the dawn and twilight glories of the low-running Arctic sun.

Well, finding myself in Sweden again in winter, I resolved to push my explorations a little farther toward the North Pole and to enjoy once more, if possible, one of the most delightful experiences of my life. The former journey was made about the middle of February, if I remember rightly, and certain engagements obliged me to turn my face southward before I had nearly reached the “farthest north” which I longed for. This time I resolved that I would not be robbed of a single zero joy, but would, if possible, catch the sun napping; that is, that I would get beyond that degree of latitude where for days at a time he never shows his face above the rim of the horizon, and where the mild-mannered moon almost rivals his power at midday.

In order to do this, and to find the sun hibernating, I had to leave Stockholm early in January, for, though he goes to bed in many parts of Lapland late in November, he rises and shakes out his golden locks before the middle of January, unless you go to the most northern point of Scandinavia, and then you get out of Swedish Lapland into Norway. So you see I had no time to lose, if I would catch the sun in bed, and must leave other charms of Sweden in winter as well as in summer for later letters.

To go far beyond the arctic circle in winter is not much to brag about in Sweden, for you can make the journey quite as comfortably as you can go from New York to Chicago, and the distance, by the way, from Stockholm to Kiruna is about the same.

Do not suppose, however, that we have any “Twentieth Century Limited” in this part of the world. The Lapland flier takes about thirty-eight hours to make the distance, but one need have no fear of dashing into another flier at the rate of fifty miles an hour, for the Lapland express runs only three times a week in either direction.

A Typical Swedish Landscape in Winter.

Though the speed is not hair-raising, the accommodations are all that could be desired. Only second and third-class cars are run on most of the roads of Sweden, though, by a polite fiction, you can buy a first-class ticket if you insist upon it. If you are “a fool, a lord, or an American,” you may possibly do so, in which case you will pay the combined fare of a second and third-class ticket. The guard will put you in a second-class compartment just the same as those of your fellow travelers and paste up on the window the words “First Class.” It is said that at the same time he sticks his tongue in his cheek and winks derisively at the brakeman.

I cannot vouch for this fact, for I have never bought a first-class ticket in Sweden, and I never should, even if I had money “beyond the dreams of avarice,” as the novelist would say. For the second-class compartments are entirely comfortable, upholstered in bright plush, with double windows and ample heat, which each traveler can turn on or off for himself, a little table on which to put your books and writing materials, a carafe of fresh water, which is changed several times a day, and a crystal-clear tumbler. What more can you ask? To be sure your privacy is more likely to be invaded than if you are a “first-class” snob, and you may sometimes have as many as three other people in your compartments, which easily accommodates six. But to see the people and hear them, even if you cannot understand their tongue, is part of the joy of traveling, and the Swedish language is so musical with its sing-song rhythm that it never grates upon the ear, and if one is disposed for a nap it will quite lull him to sleep.

My friend, ex-Minister Thomas, has so admirably described one inevitable and absolutely unique Swedish expression that I think I must quote for you his sprightly account of it. “Should you ever hear two persons talking in a foreign tongue,” he says, “and are in doubt as to what nation they belong, just listen. If one or the other does not say ‘ja sÅ,’ within two minutes, it is proof positive they are not Swedes. There is the ‘ja sÅ’ (pronounced ya so) expressing assent to the views you are imparting, ‘just so’; the ‘ja sÅ’ of approval and admiration, with a bow and a smile; the ‘ja sÅ’ of astonishment, wonder, and surprise at the awful tale you are unfolding. Now the Swede’s eyes and mouth become circles of amazement, and he draws out his reply, ‘ja so-o-o-o-o-o-o!’ There is the hesitating ‘ja sÅ’ of doubt; the abrupt ‘ja sÅ, ja sÅ!’ twice repeated, which politely informs you that your friend does not believe a word you are saying; the ‘ja sÅ’ sarcastic, insinuating, and derogatory; the fierce ‘ja sÅ’ of denial; the enraged ‘ja sÅ,’ as satisfactory as swearing; the threatening ‘ja sÅ,’ fully equivalent to ‘I’ll punch your head’; and the pleasant, purring, pussycat ‘ja sÅ,’ chiefly used by the fair—a sort of flute obligato accompaniment to your discourse, which shows that she is listening and pleased, and encourages you to continue. And other ‘ja sÅs’ there be, too numerous for mention. I am inclined to think there is not an emotion of the human soul that the Swedes cannot express by ‘ja sÅ,’ but the accent and intonation are different in every case. Each feeling has its own peculiar ‘ja sÅ,’ and there be as many, at least, as there are smells in Cologne, which number, the most highly educated nostrils give, if I mistake not, as seventy-three.”

Some other phrases in Swedish are almost equally useful, and if we should hear a fellow traveler say lagom over and over again we would know that somebody or something was “just about right,” though we might not be able to determine from the context whether he was referring to the scenery, to his wife’s disposition, or to the frokost which he enjoyed at the last railway station.

Another very useful Swedish word, which it is a pity we cannot introduce into our English vocabulary, is syskon. This is a collective noun, referring to brothers and sisters alike and embracing all of them that belong to one family. As “parents” refers to both father and mother, so syskon means all the brothers and sisters of the family.

However, if I keep on with this rambling philological discussion I shall not get you to Kiruna, my dear Judicia, even within the thirty-eight hours which the Swedish time-table allows. I must tell you though that, since this is a journey of two nights and parts of two days, the “lying down” accommodations are quite as important as those for sitting up. But for five crowns additional, or about $1.30, you can secure a comfortable berth, nicely made up in your compartment, with clean linen.

The black porter with his whisk brush is not at all in evidence, for there is no dust in these trains, at least in winter time, and the white porter who makes up your bed, who is, I suspect, also a brakeman, is never seen except night and morning, when he makes and unmakes it. When you alight you never hear the familiar phrase, “Brush you off, sah?” and you have to search for your bed-maker if you desire to slip a kroner into his hand—a piece of superogatory generosity which quite surprises him.

Something over an hour after leaving Stockholm on our journey north we came to the famous old university city of Upsala, but I could not stop here if I wished to see the Midday Moon, and shall have to go back at some future day in order to tell you about this most interesting historic town in Sweden, the burial place of Gustavus Vasa and the depository of one of the world’s chief philological treasures, the Codex Argenteus.

The Lapland express leaves Stockholm at 6.30 in the evening, which at this time of the year is several hours after dark, and it was not until the next morning, between nine and ten o’clock, that the landscape became visible; yet the first signs of dawn come wonderfully early in these northern latitudes, considering how near we are to the land of perpetual night. By eight o’clock in the morning one has a suspicion that the sun is somewhere far, far below the horizon. By nine o’clock the suspicion deepens into a certainty, and by ten o’clock on your side of the arctic circle, where I found myself early on the morning after leaving Stockholm, the tiniest rim of the sun may be seen peering above the horizon, as though uncertain whether it were worth while to go the rest of the way or not.

I wish I had counted the number of minutes he required to fairly get above the horizon after showing his first segment. I remember that once in Iceland I timed the setting sun, and it took him just seven minutes to sink below the horizon. You remember how in the tropics he plumps down and up, as we have seen him in South America and in India. For a shrewd Yankee guess I would say that it takes Phoebus from fifteen to twenty minutes to really rise and shake out his golden locks in Lapland, in wintertime.

The day was a short one, at least the daylight day—not more than six hours in length; but what a glorious day it was! The fairies were at work while I slept and trimmed every twig and pine needle and every spray on every bush with thick, white rime. Once in a lifetime one sees such a sight in America, and then not in its perfection. In Sweden it is an everyday occurrence, but it is always inexpressibly lovely. So lavish are these frosty decorations that no humblest stump or fence rail is omitted. It is no little layer of frost either that you have to examine with the microscope in order to see its beauties, but a thick and heavy fringe, often fully two inches deep. Neither is it an evanescent creation, for, as the low-running sun is not very powerful, it does not melt until well along toward high noon, and there is no wind to dissipate it.

Even when this glory of the morning frost is gone, the snow still remains on all the larger branches of the trees, and one misses only the fine tracery of the frost, which brings out in marvelous black and white the wonders of this rarely beautiful scene.

The views on this journey are seldom imposing and grand. There are no Alps, and even our own White Mountains eclipse in majesty anything that I have seen in northern Sweden. For the most part the landscape is a peaceful, pastoral one. Little farmhouses with their cluster of outbuildings abound, the stables for the cattle and the hardy horses being built as warm as for the hardy men and women. The smoke curls up straight toward the zenith and hangs like a cloudy pillar over every chimney. The people who come to the railway stations are healthy and ruddy. Most of them come on skis, and others with kick-sleds, which they shove before them, standing upon one runner; often they make marvelously good time, even with a heavy load on the sled.

These farmhouses look so attractive with their dull red walls and green roofs that I often wished the train would stop and let me visit them. But I have seen enough of them to know how they look inside. They are usually one story high. In the middle is a large living room with two or three smaller rooms opening out of it. This living room is parlor and dining room, and sometimes kitchen as well, and not infrequently, if you look carefully, you will see two little alcoves, one on either side, covered with a curtain during the day. These, you must know, are the bedrooms, or bed alcoves. The hole in the wall is just big enough to contain a single bed, while the baby’s cradle is hung near the mother’s bed, from a rafter in the ceiling, and a touch of the hand will set it swinging. The walls are hung with rude but interesting tapestries, made by the housewife herself and representing Bible scenes, or sometimes more familiar landscapes. Do you remember how we saw just such a room in Cavalla, the old Neapolis of St. Paul, and the famous Mahomet Ali’s cradle hanging from the roof in just that way?

In Skansen, a beautiful park near Stockholm, where are preserved things characteristically Swedish from all parts of the kingdom, one may see houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, built on exactly the same plan, only that the modern farmhouse is ampler and cleaner and has many conveniences which the Goth of olden times would have doubtless considered effeminate luxury. I wonder what he would have said if he had heard the tinkle of a telephone bell, as he might to-day in many a Swedish farmhouse, and had been told that way up beyond the Arctic circle he could speak into a little tube against the wall and be heard distinctly in Stockholm or Christiania, or Berlin or Paris, for that matter.

But I am getting ahead of my story, and this railway ride is so delightful that I cannot bear to have you, any more than myself, lose a mile of it. Though the scenery for the most part is not majestic, at times it grows bold and striking. Some hills of considerable size appear upon the horizon. Charming valleys open up between them, where the frequency of farmhouses shows that the soil is peculiarly fertile. Wide, brawling rivers rush to the sea so impetuously that even arctic cold cannot fetter them. There are hours of such scenery, which satisfy the desire of the most romantic imagination; yet for the most part there is a mild and subdued loveliness about the view from our car windows which has its own peculiar charm and which needs no precipitous cliffs or bleak mountainsides or cavernous gorges to enhance its beauty.

At last we came to one of the most interesting stations in the world. It is not very grand, to be sure, and it is half buried in snow, and you see scarcely a house in the vicinity. But it is exactly on the arctic circle, and rejoices in the appropriate name of Polcirkeln. I almost hugged myself as a polar explorer until I looked around at my comfortable surroundings—luxurious plush seats, a temperature of exactly 68° according to the thermometer in my compartment, the soft glow of the electric lamp overhead when the early twilight appears.

Someone who has written of these winter days in the far north says: “It is not the cold and snow that make the northern winter dreary; cold and snow are invigorating and exhilarating. It is the short days and leaden skies; the long darkness and the gloom; the perpetual sense of being pursued by the dark as by a nightmare; the perpetual hurry by day to accomplish something before the darkness overtakes you; and the ever-present, unformed, unreasoning, lurking fear, strongest in December, lest the life-giving sun leave you forever.”

But I must say that I have never felt this depression of spirits in the far north. For the most part the skies are not leaden, but the long dawn and the longer twilight paint them with all imaginable colors with which the rainbow can scarcely vie. Why should one be in a perpetual hurry in such a land? There are twenty-four hours in the day here as in the tropics. Most things you can do by electric light as well as by daylight, and there is plenty of the former, not only on the trains but in every considerable town. As for the fear that the sun will never rise again, even if you do not see him for a month he gives you abundant evidence that he is just below the horizon and that you will soon see his cheerful face again.

Of course I had three square meals during this arctic day, and even beyond Polcirkeln in this wilderness of ice and snow the railway restaurants flow with metaphorical milk and honey. But I have already described a Swedish railway eating-house, and I will only tell you now that when I came to pay my modest bill at a restaurant well into Lapland the pretty cashier, when she saw that I spoke “American,” beamed all over with delight and exclaimed in rapturous joy: “When did you come over, and how are all the folks?” In the remaining minutes before the train started I learned that she had lived for several years in America, where she had many relatives, and that she had only just returned to her arctic home. I was glad to inform her that all the folks in America were well, so far as my knowledge extended. This artless little piece of Americanism amid the snows of Sweden brightened the journey for many an hour.

And here, dear Judicia, I think I must end the story of one of the most delightful of travel days. To-morrow I will tell you something of what I have seen in Kiruna and its wonderful mountain of solid iron.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

SIXTH LETTER

In this chapter Phillips describes a day without a sunrise; his anxiety lest the sun should appear; the wonderful beauties of sunrise and sunset where the sun never appears; the fitful glories of the aurora borealis; the daily bombardment of Kiruna; the great iron mountain from which the bombardment comes; LuleÅ, the metropolis of the north, and a Lapp encampment in winter.

Kiruna, January 14.

My dear Judicia,

I wonder if, when you were a girl, you were as much fascinated by Bayard Taylor’s travel books as I was. Did you read Views Afoot, and especially did you gloat over his Northern Travels? If you did, you remember how when he got up toward the borders of the arctic circle, though he did not get nearly as far north as Kiruna, he went out of his hotel door one morning and found that the thermometer had sunk to forty degrees below zero. Do you remember with what a sort of rapture he recorded this fact, as though he had now actually reached the land of the aurora borealis, and how he seemed to revel in every degree that the mercury sank? I will not be sure of the exact degree of cold that so rejoiced his soul, for I have not read my Bayard Taylor for many a year, but I was conscious of an experience something like his when I went out on the crisp, frosty streets of Kiruna this morning and watched for the sun which I devoutly hoped would not rise.

By nine o’clock the sky had begun to glow faintly. I wandered about the streets, keeping my eye on the eastern horizon as earnestly as a good Mohammedan faces toward Mecca. Moment by moment the glow, which was at first barely discernible, deepened, and the fleecy clouds grew rosy. Evidently something was doing just below the horizon; but very, very gradually the dawn came on. By ten o’clock the sky was blushing like a modest damsel in the presence of her lover, but still the Lord of Day did not appear. Ten minutes after ten, twenty minutes after, half-past ten! It seemed as though the sun must break above the horizon line at any moment, but still he delayed his coming, while all along the east, and far up toward the zenith, the sky was flushed with such a light, it seemed to me, as never was on sea or shore.

Twenty minutes of eleven, and still he did not appear; ten minutes of eleven, and I could see that the sunrise glories were a trifle dimmed, and a little to the north the beginning of the glorious pageant that attends the setting sun. Eleven o’clock came, and I was sure of it. The sun was setting and not rising. Though the skies were all aflame, and sunset mingled with the dawn, it was very evident that old Sol would not show his face in Kiruna to-day. Hurrah! I have got beyond the sunrise. I am in the land of the Midday Moon!

And why is it not as notable a thing to see a day without a sunrise as to see a day without a sunset? Why do not people travel to northern Sweden or Norway to see the Midday Moon, as well as the Midnight Sun? I venture to say that the phenomena of midwinter are even more glorious than those of midsummer. I cannot imagine that one would see any such wonderful sky tints in summer as in winter. For hours the sun’s beams played upon the feathery clouds of pale blue sky and constantly changed them from glory to glory.

At one time the brilliant tints predominated and the splashes of golden color lighting up the white snow put even Turner’s pictures to the blush. After many minutes these fiery colors changed to exquisite green and blue, and broken, opalescent hues adorned the clouds. Then a red gleam showed under one dark blue cloud. The sun seemed to summon all its strength for one last burst of glory, and the western sky, which I thought had passed its acme, glowed once more with a deep red, as though some vast furnace were throwing its hidden light upon the clouds. For more than four hours this wonderful display lasted, as sunrise faded into sunset, and it was not until nearly three o’clock this afternoon that the last beam of day had entirely faded.

But the beauty of the scene did not consist altogether in the glorious colors of the sunset. All the accessories have made it forever memorable. As I walked to the top of a little eminence near Kiruna, the stillness could almost be felt. A dog barking half a mile away was distinctly audible. The axes of the workmen whom I left building a log-house as I tramped on through the snow and climbed the hillside made a melodious tapping, which could be heard as far as the dog’s bark.

The trees everywhere were loaded with their beautiful burden of snow. The pines and birches seemed in the dim light of the setting sun to have blossomed out like cherry trees in May. The mercury registered only a little below zero, or perhaps some forty degrees of frost, according to Celsius, by whose thermometers the Swedes swear, for I have found no such cold weather as that in which Bayard Taylor revelled. But the zero air was so dry and still that the ordinary clothes which I found necessary and none too much for Boston east winds were entirely sufficient.

As I came down the hill, the workmen were still busy on their log house in the deepening twilight. A Yankee in a white slouch hat must be a rarity in these altitudes in winter, but they did not pause in their work or exhibit any curiosity at the sight of an outlander. Perhaps their natures partake of the largeness and solitude of their great forests and snow fields, and they are not moved by the curiosity which affects other mortals. After watching them for a few moments, I left them fitting their logs together without nails or spikes, sawing and cutting with bare hands in this zero weather as though it were balmy June.

But even when the last ray of the setting sun (which had never risen) had faded away, the glories of the Arctic night did not disappear. Indeed they had but just begun, for the aurora borealis began to shoot out its wavy lines of fire in the northern sky. Higher and higher the waves mounted toward the zenith, until they arched overhead. Palpitating like a living thing, the white would change to green, and the green to a reddish glow, and all the time the streamers that seemed to be shooting up as from a mighty volcano on either side of the North Pole waved and wavered like banners in the wind; now being folded in upon themselves, then flaunted out to their full width, as though Erebus himself were blowing upon them.

But the interests of Kiruna are not altogether centered in the far horizon. At half-past eight in the morning, and again at half-past four in the afternoon, I was startled by a series of tremendous explosions. They could not be thunderclaps, for there were few clouds in the sky and not the slightest indication of a storm.

Over and over again the thundering volleys rolled, and as I looked toward the west I could see a vivid flash in the darkness preceding the thunderclap by some seconds. And yet the flash and the thunder did not seem to come from the sky, but from a massive hill, which bulked dimly against the horizon, across an intervening valley. You have already guessed what the bombardment was. It came from the mighty iron mountain of Kiruna and was the explosion of the dynamite charges which every morning and every afternoon are set off to loosen the ore. More like a rapid-fire Gatling gun perhaps than like thunderclaps the explosions became, after the first few shots, and from various parts of the mountain, high up and low down, and to the right and the left, one could see the dull flashes and hear the reverberating roar, scores of shots every minute, until perhaps two hundred had been fired.

This iron mountain accounts for a lot of things in this part of the world. This was the magnet which drew the railway, the most northerly railway on the face of the earth, up so far through the dreary Lapland wilds. Do not suppose for a moment that the Swedes were so philanthropic as to build the road for the sake of a few Americans who wanted to see the Midday Moon or the Midnight Sun (for you must know that you can see his Majesty from the top of Kiruna’s iron mountain all day long if you happen to be there any day during the latter part of June). No, it was this great loadstone mountain that compelled the thrifty Swedes to build a railway through the snow a thousand miles north of Stockholm. Their enterprise was well repaid, for this mountain is from fifty to sixty per cent solid iron, and the best iron in the world.

From Kiruna it is transported nearly one hundred miles farther north to Narvik, across the Norwegian border, where there is an ice-free port all the year round, and where great ships are constantly waiting within its quiet fjord to transport sections of Kiruna’s iron mountain to New York and Philadelphia and London and Hamburg and Boston. There is another iron hill some five or six miles from Kiruna, from which the ore is shipped by overhead electric skids to Kiruna and thence transported by rail to Narvik. Indeed it is said by geologists that all the hills about this little Arctic metropolis are full of iron, and they are not likely to be exhausted for a thousand years to come.

Kiruna reminds me of a hustling American town more than any other that I have seen in this part of the world. It is only fourteen years old, and yet it has ten thousand inhabitants; hundreds of well-built houses; a good electric tramway, which carries the miners back and forth from the works on the mountain to their homes in the little city; four fine schoolhouses, and a big church with a huge bell tower, situated at some little distance from the sanctuary.

Let us not plume ourselves on the thought that we have all the enterprise in the world, or lay the flattering unction to our souls that no one else can build a city in a decade, for here is one with all the conveniences and comforts and many of the luxuries of life; and if we go another hundred miles farther north we shall find a still larger town, less than twelve years old, with good blocks of stores, large residences, and splendid wharves, to which the commerce of the world pays tribute; for Narvik, where the sun does not rise for a month or six weeks in wintertime, is even younger than Kiruna. To-morrow I intend to go to LuleÅ (pronounce it Luleo, for the little circle over the a gives it the o sound), and I will finish this arctic letter there.

LuleÅ on the Baltic.

A funny, if chilly, experience awaited me when I arrived here last night. It was well on toward midnight, and, though a crowd of fellow passengers disembarked from the third-class cars, there was no hotel porter or trager or dienstman to tell me where I should go. My somewhat aged Baedeker had not informed me of the name of a single hotel.

The only individual who took any interest in me was a small boy, and from his voluble Swedish and more comprehensible gestures I felt that he wished to lead me to a hotel. Having nothing better to do, I followed my diminutive guide. It was very cold, at least twenty degrees below zero, the severest weather I have seen at all in this northland. The streets were dark, for most of the electric lights had been put out, but I followed the small boy trustingly. When I seemed to waver in my allegiance, he would run back and urge me on. At last we came to a house which had few signs of being a hostelry. I suspect it was his mother’s humble residence. I followed him in at the door, and he discoursed fluently to the lady of the house, apparently telling her of my needs. She looked quite as blank as I did, but at last she opened a door into a somewhat shabby parlor and gave me to understand that I could sleep on the lounge if I wished to.

I declined the invitation, for I remembered having passed in the dark a house that looked more like a hotel. Going back through the frosty air, I soon found it, and over the door made out the legend Privat Hotellet. Here, much to my joy, I found a large room, nicely heated, with two beds, a huge, white monument of a stove, and a whole picture gallery, though not all by the old masters, on the wall, and all this for seventy-five cents a day. To be sure I could get neither bite nor sup in this Privat Hotellet, but what did that matter when almost at the next door I found, in the morning, a restaurant on whose generous tables were piled mounds of butter, stacks of oat cakes at least two feet high, a peck of small potatoes, unlimited milk and coffee, pickled fish, fried fish, cold meat, everything on the most lavish scale, and all for sixty Öre, or fifteen cents?

But you should have seen my fellow boarders eat! They were all hardy tars, who had sailed the Baltic for many a year, when the ice does not interfere with their trade, and the way they made those viands disappear was a caution to a dyspeptic. Even Aylmer, who has just joined me here on his way south from northern Norway (did I forget to give you this interesting piece of information, Judicia?), could not keep up with them. He said that they could give the boys in the college commons a good handicap and then beat them in the race through the breakfast, hands down—but then they had the advantage of being able to use both knife and fork with equal dexterity.

LuleÅ, as you have already gathered, is on the banks of the Baltic; in fact, it is on its extreme northern shore, and the sea here is so charged with fresh water from the more than two hundred rivers that flow into it from the Swedish and the Finnish shores that it is like a great fresh-water lake, and freezes in its northern end as solidly as Moosehead or Winnepesaukee. As we wandered down to the shore the next morning after our hotel adventure, we could see nothing but a vast expanse of snow-covered ice. Only a few large schooners and small steamers, frozen solidly into the ice, convinced us that this was indeed the Baltic Sea.

LuleÅ is a very presentable town, quite the metropolis of this part of the world. Many of the blocks are of brick and stone. A splendid church of cathedral dimensions stands in the center of the town, broad streets lined with well-built houses radiate from it on every side, and an enormous hotel overlooking the Baltic makes an attractive bid for summer visitors, though at this time of year it is closed as tight as a bank vault.

I must not forget to tell you about the glorious snow and frost of LuleÅ. We have seen it everywhere throughout northern Sweden, as I have before told you, but never in such absolute perfection as in this favored town. This is, indeed, the Spell of Sweden. The slight fogs which often envelop this region for a little time and then disappear leave their beautiful frescoing upon every tree and bush and telegraph wire and fence post. Rather, perhaps, I should say they do the work of a sculptor and transform everything into pure white marble. Every smallest twig is covered thick with rime, never less than two inches deep. Strike the tree a sharp blow with your cane and a perfect shower of snow will descend, powdering you from head to foot, unless you quickly stand from under. But the next morning the tree will be covered once more by this invisible sculptor with powdery marble, and again it stands statuesque and lovely in its immaculate white against the sky.

When the rime is not so thick, magical nature transforms the trees and shrubs into white coral, and the little arctic bushes, which can never grow to any great height, stand up above the snow in such a way that you can scarcely believe that some ancient sea has not receded and left a forest of coral exposed to view.

The only spot of color in this white wilderness is made by the mountain-ash tree which the LuleÅns have induced to grow in one of their parks. These trees are covered thickly with bright red berries, which the English sparrows—unfortunately even the Arctic cold and snows cannot drive them away—rejoice in. They pick out the kernels of the berries and cover the snow beneath with the blood-red husks.

One most delightful excursion we must take you upon. It can be made from almost any point in Lapland, but LuleÅ is as good a starting point as any. It is a visit to the nomadic Lapps who abound in this region. We often see these little fellows, with their yellow faces, about the color of snuff, of which I understand they are inordinately fond, and their slanting Mongolian eyes, as they come into the towns with their reindeer hitched to long sledges. These patient animals furnish them with almost all that they need—meat and tents and clothing and milk; thread made from their sinews and needles from their bones. When the Lapps want a little money for tobacco or coffee they drive a deer into the neighboring town and sell him for whatever his carcass will bring.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

Reindeer and Lapps from North Sweden, now in Skansen Park, Stockholm.

But you must see them in their native habitat to really know the Lapps. So we hired a sledge whose low runners raise one but a few inches from the crisp snow, stuck our feet into the abundant straw, tucked around us the warm reindeer robes, pulled our caps over our ears, and told our driver to do his best to find a Lapp camp. This is not always easy, for the Lapps are genuine gypsies in their liking for a nomadic life, and they are here to-day, there to-morrow, and somewhere else the next day.

However our driver had an idea in what direction they might be found, and, after half a dozen English miles, or about one Swedish mile, we heard a tremendous barking of dogs and knew that we were approaching our goal, for the one indispensable quadruped, aside from the reindeer, in a Lapp encampment, is a barking dog, and often a good many of him. It was not a large camp, only a single family of Lapps with perhaps twenty or thirty reindeer and half a dozen dogs. Their only shelter, even when the mercury reaches fifty below zero, is this reindeer-skin tent, with a hole in the top and quite loose around the sides.

A miserable fire burned in the center of the tent, and some of the smoke found its way through the hole in the top. But hospitality is not unknown even in these snowy wilds, and our hosts at once set to work to make us a cup of coffee, their one luxury, which they knew their visitors would appreciate. To be sure the cup and coffeepot looked almost as dirty as the faces of our hosts, but who minds a few microbes more or less among the millions you are constantly swallowing. To be sure, also, our hosts expected a gift of several times the value of the cup of coffee, but that was purely a gift and not by any means payment for value received.

I cannot say that I fell in love with the Lapps or their surroundings, but I must confess that I conceived a new admiration for the missionary spirit of Prince Bernadotte, the brother of the King of Sweden, who I understand has sometimes come to this far north region to preach to the Laplanders.

He once informed me that the only time he was ever in Russia was when he stepped across the boundary of Swedish Lapland into Finnish Lapland, and then only a few feet on the other side. I suppose that a Swedish prince would very likely be persona non grata in the dominions of the reactionary Czar.

A half-hour in the Lapp settlement was enough for a complete disillusionment concerning the joys of nomadic life in Lapland, and we were glad to turn our faces once more toward the thriving little metropolis of the north Baltic.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

SEVENTH LETTER

Contains a glimpse of the history of Sweden as suggested by the monuments of Stockholm; Birger Jarl; Bridget, the saint without a monument; Gustavus Adolphus, the champion of Protestantism; Charles XII, who conquered half of Europe; LinnÆus, the lover of flowers; John Ericsson, the inventor of the “Monitor.”

Stockholm, January 17.

My dear Judicia,

My last letter left us in a Lapp camp on the northern edge of the Gulf of Bothnia, surrounded by dirty Lapps, yelping dogs, and ruminating reindeer; and here I am, after three days, in Stockholm again, while Aylmer has gone back to his beloved Norway, striking across Sweden and over the mountain by rail to Trondhjem, since he was unwilling, as he said, to “waste any time in Sweden.”

Imagine, Judicia, the superciliousness of youth! To waste time in Sweden, the land of heroes and patriots, the land of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII, the land that saved northern Europe for liberty and freedom of conscience. Wasting time in Sweden, indeed!

What should you say to the idea of studying a little Swedish history with me, with the help of the monuments of Stockholm? Some people, I know, consider monuments a great bore and hasten by them with scarcely a glance, but that is because they do not know the delightful stories that they can tell with their bronze or marble lips.

Let us first call upon Birger Jarl. We find him on Riddarholmen, standing erect on a lofty marble pillar, with his shield and his sword, his steel armor and his helmet, looking down from his lofty pedestal as though he would say to us: “What have I to do with you, upstart Americans, you children of a day, whose nearest western shore even was not discovered by Columbus for more than two hundred years after I sailed the seas in my viking ships.”

The great Jarl seems to have been the first one to have discovered the impregnable position which Stockholm’s islands offered for defense. To be sure there was quite a population on these islands before Birger’s time, but he was a man of far-seeing vision, as his position on his lofty monument indicates, so he made of Stockholm one great fort. On every side it was surrounded by water, the great Lake MÄlar, and the two rushing rivers that carried its waters to the Baltic.

Birger was never anything but a Jarl, but he was the greatest of all the earls, and so powerful that he was able to place his son Magnus above all his brother earls, and made him the first king of Sweden. Magnus was not unworthy of his name, for he too was a great ruler for those rude times, though if the son was Magnus I think the father should be called Major, if not Maximus, for he really founded the kingdom of Sweden, as well as the city of Stockholm.

Sweden of course had a history before the days of Birger and Magnus, but it is so mixed up with that of Norway and Denmark, who were really the predominant partners in those early days, that I shall have to resign St. Olaf and some of the other exceedingly interesting worthies of that time to the pen of Aylmer, thus giving him, my dear Judicia, a vast advantage in his efforts to claim for Norway your favorable verdict.

I must remark in passing, however, that St. Olaf, or King Olaf Haraldson of Norway, to give him his full title, once found himself and all his fleet shut up in Lake MÄlar by chains stretched across its western outlet. This was in the year 1007; so in order to get out of his cul-de-sac, he dug a shallow channel across a neck of land that prevented him from making his way into the Baltic, that he might thus evade the clutches of Olaf SkÖtkonung of Sweden. Nature favored his project, and the strong current that sets from the great lake to the Baltic Sea soon wore a wide thoroughfare, through which the king and all his ships escaped into the Baltic and thence home to Norway. This channel made of a former peninsula the island of Staden, so that the Swedes may thank St. Olaf for making one of the three great islands of their capital which Birger Jarl found it so easy to fortify and defend.

A monument that I have been looking for but have not yet found, though there may be one somewhere in Stockholm, is a memorial to St. Bridget. If any Swedish woman deserves a monument, surely it is this same saint “Birgitta,” as she is called in Swedish. In my youth I naturally supposed that St. Bridget was an Irish lady; but she was a pure Swede, and a Swede of the mystical type, in some respects not unlike a fellow countryman of more modern days—the great Swedenborg. She devoutly believed that she received many revelations from Christ and the Virgin Mary, which are preserved to this day in large tomes.

She lived before the Reformation, but was none the less a reformer of the first order. The rule of her abbey, which she believed was enjoined by Christ himself, made chastity, humility, and voluntary poverty the first requisites. “No member of the convent could possess the smallest piece of money; nor even touch silver or gold except when necessary for embroidery, and then only after permission obtained from the abbess. The nuns ate the simplest food and fasted three days in the week. To remind them of their mortality, a bier always stood at the church door, and near the cloister yawned an open grave. Thither these devout women repaired every day, and the abbess threw a handful of earth into the pit, while the sisters repeated psalms and prayers.”[1]

In these days, when the social pendulum has swung so far to the other extreme, there is something worthily heroic in this story of good Birgitta. There is a tonic in it, like a strong east wind, that blows away the miasma of modern social life.

Whatever we may think of her, she made a tremendous impression upon Sweden, an impression which is fresh and vivid to this day, as anyone who studies the history of Sweden speedily discovers. St. Bridget was a woman of tremendous courage. She knew how to reprove the Pope as well as the King. Moreover, her influence was not confined to Sweden, for she spent much time in Rome and is acknowledged throughout the whole Catholic world as one of their greatest saints.

Again come with me to one of the chief squares of Stockholm, and there we will see the figure of the noblest Swede of them all, Gustavus Adolphus, the hero of Protestantism, the victor of a score of hard-fought battles. I will not take you to the monument of Gustavus Vasa, the grandfather of Gustavus Adolphus, for we have already traced his glorious career from the days when he was a hunted fugitive in Dalecarlia to the day when he mounted in triumph the Swedish throne at Stockholm.

But great as was the grandfather, his grandson Adolphus was greater still, as a general, as a reformer, as a man. Between the days of the grandfather and the grandson Sweden had thrown off the power of the Roman church, whose possessions had been seized by the crown; and two of the immediate disciples and pupils of Luther, the brothers Olaus and Laurentius Petri, had firmly established the reformed religion throughout the kingdom.

An unhappy interregnum between grandfather Vasa and grandson Adolphus, who ascended the throne in 1611, had left Sweden in a parlous state, with foes without and fightings within. The great king and general succeeded in shutting out Russia from the Baltic and capturing one of the important provinces of Poland, Livland, which also bordered on the Baltic. But it was not until 1630 that Gustavus Adolphus became a mighty figure in European history. For twelve years the German Protestants had been putting up a courageous but losing fight with the overwhelmingly superior Catholic forces of Europe. Little by little they had been beaten, and their power was being gradually circumscribed.

“In 1630 it seemed as though the continent of Europe was hopelessly doomed to fall beneath the united supremacy of the Papacy and the Empire. From the southern shore of the Baltic Wallenstein, the great leader of the imperial forces, stretched his hand threateningly to grasp the Baltic Sea and its approach, the sound, which chief means of communication with the ocean had become for Sweden a matter of vital importance to keep open. As much to defend the independence as the Protestantism of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus was forced to go to Germany and there assail the enemy on his own ground. Within the short period of two years he succeeded by his brilliancy both as a warrior and a statesman in changing the fate of the world.”[2]

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

Lion-Guarded Statue of Charles XIII in King’s Garden, Stockholm.

His brilliant exploits in Germany were confined to two short years. His great victory at Breitenfeld in 1631 was followed by the battle of LÜtzen in 1632, which cost Sweden and the world the victor’s life. But though the war raged for sixteen years longer, the Protestant cause was never again hopeless. The victory of Adolphus turned the tide, and his noble personal friend and chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, maintained the prestige of Sweden as one of the great powers of the world, fully recognized in the Peace of Westphalia, which in 1648 closed the bloody Thirty Years’ War.

As I stand before the fine equestrian statue of Gustavus, I take off my hat to that noble warrior and reformer, even though it is frosty winter weather, and, as I look at his majestic figure, I can hear the Swedish army on the battlefield of LÜtzen singing the king’s own hymn of triumph:

“Fear not, O little flock, the foe

That madly seeks your overthrow.”

It has been truly said the “sword of Gustavus Adolphus was mighty as the pen of Luther.”

Every year on the sixth of November a great procession of Swedes with bands and banners, led by the famous choral societies of Stockholm, proceeds through the streets on a triumphal march to the Church of the Knights, where the great king lies buried, a spot forever sacred to the lovers of freedom.

In the king’s park in Stockholm we find another interesting statue, that of Charles XII. He stands with his sword in one hand pointing with powerful finger to the Baltic, on whose shores he gained his greatest victories.

As I gazed at the noble statue, I thought how this great-grandson of Gustavus Vasa came to the throne as a boy of fifteen years of age. How three years after, Russia, with Peter the Great for her emperor; Poland, then the great power of central Europe; Saxony and Denmark all united their forces to crush this eighteen-year-old king and the country for which he fought so bravely. But he was equal to them all. One after another he conquered Denmark, Prussia, and Poland in the field, and for nine years with Sweden, a little nation of only two and a half millions of people at his back, he held them all at bay.

“With an army of eight hundred half-starved, half-frozen Swedes on a chill November morning he charged upon forty thousand Russians behind intrenchments at Narva and put them to utter rout, taking in prisoners alone more than double his little army.”

Many were his vicissitudes; defeated after nine years of victory by the Russians at Pultava, he had to flee to Turkey, hoping to enlist the sympathies of the Sultan against the Russians. For five years he remained there in exile, and then, almost alone, in an incredibly short space of time, made his way across Europe, and for years more fought the battles of Sweden against mighty odds, but with indomitable courage and often with success, until a bullet at the battle of Fredrikshald in Norway put an end to this heroic life and at the same time closed the era of Sweden’s greatness.

I cannot take you to all the statues of Stockholm to-day, Judicia, but there are two others which I think we must visit. As a lover of flowers you would never forgive me if we did not together make our obeisance before the monument of LinnÆus. It is true that he is associated more particularly with Upsala and its university, where I hope later to see his grave, but he has a worthy statue in Stockholm in the HumlegÅrd. There he stands in a benignant attitude that befits a great naturalist. I am glad that he is surrounded by the trees and plants and flowers that he loved so well and did so much to make us familiar with.

When a man is preËminently distinguished in one line, his services to the world in other directions are apt to be overlooked. LinnÆus was not only a great botanist, but a distinguished physician and a brilliant writer on geographical subjects. He traveled much throughout Sweden, and our knowledge of Swedish life in the eighteenth century is largely due to his interesting and accurate accounts of his travels. He is said also to have created a new style of Swedish prose, and to have been as eminent as a teacher as he was as an investigator.

You would hardly recognize him under his Swedish name, Carolus a LjnnÉ, or Carl von LinnÉ, as he is more commonly called. LinnÉ was the most prominent lecturer of his time, we are told. “When he took a ramble, discoursing as he went and ‘demonstrating Flora’s charming children’ then Botany became the scientia amabilis, a knowledge of which was an honor for all, from royalty down to the poorest peasant.”

As I gazed at his statue, however, I could not help thinking, with a sense of mild pity, of the millions of school children with no great gifts for botanical research who have struggled over the two hard names which he set the fashion of assigning to every plant, one for the genus and one for the species; and who have studied, with many a groan, his system of identifying plants which seem to them as dry as the herbariums which they have been compelled to collect and arrange.

One other statue, among the latest erected in Stockholm, is of peculiar interest to Americans, for it commemorates the man who, more than any other inventor, saved the Union in the terribly black days of ’63. This man was Captain John Ericsson, the son of a Swedish miner, “born and brought up in a miner’s hut in the backwoods of Sweden.” On Sunday, September 14, 1890, the body of Ericsson was given over by America to the perpetual care of Sweden, his native land. It had been brought from New York in the warship Baltimore by Captain Schley, who afterwards won his laurels on the coast of Cuba.

The body was placed on a beautiful pavilion, directly in front of the statue of Charles XII and very near one of Stockholm’s principal quays. With solemn ceremonies and appropriate words the body was conveyed by Captain Schley to the American Minister, and by him given over to the Swedish government, a Swedish admiral accepting it in behalf of his country.

All around the catafalque were magnificent floral emblems contributed by Americans and Swedes alike, and on the coffin itself was a Monitor made of immortelles, in the American and Swedish colors, a white dove perched on the turret. This was the offering of the Swedish-American ladies who had crossed the Atlantic with the body. After these ceremonies the coffin was borne in state through the streets of Stockholm and carried to the little town of Filipstad, near which he was born. On the spot where the great funeral pavilion stood, by Stockholm’s quay, is now the monument to the inventor of the Monitor, the savior of the American Union, strong and massive as the man whom it commemorates. It will always be to every American the most admired of Stockholm’s many statues.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

EIGHTH LETTER

Wherein a jump is made from midwinter to midsummer, and the water journey from Stockholm to Upsala is described, during which the palace of Drottningholm is passed, and the famous ruins of Sigtuna, Skokloster Palace, with its rare art treasures, until we reach Upsala, the university town of Sweden, the “City of Eternal Youth,” with its thirteen “Nations.” Also something about the Codex Argenteus, the noble cathedral with its noted graces, as well as Gamla Upsala with the tumult of Odin, Thor, and Frey.

Upsala, June 15.

My dear Judicia,

It is a long time, is it not, since last I tried to impress you with the charm of Sweden. Do not think for a moment, however, that I have given up the pleasant task. It is, as you know, simply because other duties have interfered with the pleasure of telling you about this part of the great northern peninsula, and in my more brief and fragmentary letters I could not attempt to do justice to this interesting part of the earth’s surface. Now it is approaching midsummer, the glad, high days of all Scandinavia.

But to go back a little in my story. What a glorious season is spring in these northern latitudes! I pity the people who must spend all their lives in the tropics and never know the joy of seeing old mother earth wake up from her long winter’s nap.

Considering its latitude, spring comes wonderfully early in Scandinavia. Even in February you can see the yellowing of the willow trees, and the catkins begin to show their downy faces on many a bush. Very early in March you will see little girls from the country on the streets of Stockholm and Upsala, selling the earliest wild flowers, that look like our hepaticas. Soon the ice in the great lakes in the southern part of Sweden breaks up, and from the MÄlar huge cakes, on which you might build a little house and float out to sea, come rushing down through the city to the Baltic.

Perhaps you remember that when in midwinter I went to the far North to see a sunless day my railway journey took me through the university city of Upsala. In this balmy June weather I want you to go with me by boat, for it is by far the most interesting and picturesque way. Starting from the Riddarholmen quay of Stockholm, we are soon out upon the great lake which adds so much beauty to Stockholm’s environments. On all sides of us are Sweden’s vast forests of pine and birch, clothing the gentle hills to their very top and coming down to the shore until their feet are almost washed by MÄlar’s ripples. On through a long, narrow arm of the lake we steam, being admitted to new beauties by floating bridges that open their doors for us as we approach. Each turn in the channel reveals something a little more beautiful than the last scene.

Nor is it rural loveliness alone that enchants one with this journey, for we are constantly getting glimpses of charming villas, old chateaux, castles, and occasional ruins, each one of which is alive with historic interest.

The great palace of Drottningholm, with its beautiful gardens, a favorite residence of the kings of Sweden, is one of the first palaces that we see. Soon after the chateau of LennartsnÄs appears, and we remind ourselves that it was once owned by Lennart Torstenson, a hero of the Thirty Years’ War, with whom I fear that neither you nor I are acquainted. And now we come to the old city of Sigtuna, whose inhabitants, like many of the people of Palestine, are indebted to their ancestors for the modest degree of prosperity which they enjoy to-day.

A famous American preacher once published an oft-quoted sermon on the “dignity of human nature as disclosed by its ruins,” if I remember the title correctly. The former dignity of Sigtuna is certainly disclosed by its ruins, for above the few and humble dwellings of the present day rise the ruins of three mighty churches, St. Olaf, St. Per, and St. Lars.

Sigtuna was destroyed by the Esthonians from Russia, when they raided Sweden away back in the year 1181. It is said that they carried off two great silver doors from one of these churches, and if you go to Novgorod, in Russia, perhaps you will see them doing duty in some Greek Orthodox church of the present day.

But the most interesting palace that we see on our way to Upsala is Skokloster. You will see that there is more than a suspicion of a cloister in this name, for the Cistercian nuns once lived in these woods in a forest cloister. But the palace that we see was erected by the great Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Wrangel, and by studying its treasures you can learn more in half a day about the Thirty Years’ War than by reading a small library of books. It is still in the possession of the descendants of the Field Marshal, and I venture to say there is no more interesting collection in the world of the relics of the titanic struggle that freed Europe from her long thralldom.

I did not count them, but I am told that there are over twelve hundred guns and eight hundred swords and daggers, most of them the relics of this war. An immense library, a splendid collection of old manuscripts, rare pictures, and porcelain make the palace far more interesting than most museums. There is one treasure which I have since read about and which I am very sorry I did not see. It is a little gold ring containing a ruby set in diamonds. “This is the ring the great Gustavus Adolphus gave to his first and only true love, the beautiful and gifted Ebba Brahe, on their betrothal. The diamond ring that Ebba gave to Gustavus in return is preserved in the sacristy of the cathedral at Upsala.”

Five of the love letters of Gustavus are still preserved, and no lover ever wrote more ardently or charmingly. But the course of true love is not any more likely to run smoothly with princes than with other people. Indeed I am not sure but the average man has a decided advantage over a prince in that respect. For though Gustavus and Ebba were betrothed, they were never allowed to marry. The old queen would not allow Gustavus to have a Swedish subject for his wife, but made him marry a German princess with few brains and small personal attractions compared with Ebba Brahe, while Ebba married a Swedish Field Marshal. This accounts for the fact that her engagement ring is treasured at Skokloster to-day, for the son-in-law of Field Marshal Wrangel belonged to the Brahe family, in whose possession it has remained ever since.

Does not this little romance seem to bring the great warrior a little nearer to us? As we think of that little ruby ring, he is no longer a demigod, but a disappointed lover, a lovelorn wooer, “sighing like a furnace”; thinking, no doubt, unutterable things about the stern old queen who would not let him have his own way.

It gives us a glimpse, too, of the influence of woman in those old days. Even the most advanced suffragette of the present time cannot make a British Prime Minister bend to her will, while one woman in the olden days was enough to make the greatest warrior of Christendom quail and give up the one on whom he had set his heart’s affection.

But if Skokloster detains us too long, I shall not be able to bring you to Upsala to-day. A few hours after leaving Skokloster, we enter the little Fyris River, which winds through a wide plain and takes us close to the heart of Sweden’s most famous university town.

One can tell that he is in a college town before the boat ties up at the wharf, for students in white caps have come down to the wharf to meet other students in white caps, who are coming back to their college duties. There are two thousand of them here, and nearly one hundred and fifty professors and instructors. A beautiful name has been given to Upsala by someone who calls it the “City of Eternal Youth.” A happy name indeed for any college town, where every six or eight years the student body wholly changes, and with every year new blood and young life is injected into the veins of the old institution.

Some educationalists think that our college course in America is too long, and that young men are consequently obliged to begin their life work too late. What would they say to Upsala, I wonder, where the course is from six to ten years, though the average age of entering is nineteen. Philosophy, law, and theology exact six years of study on the average, before the examinations can be successfully passed, while medicine requires eight or ten. Surely the doctors of Sweden should be well equipped for their life work.

Another unique feature of Upsala University is the institution of the “Nations.” These Nations are something like the Greek-letter societies of American colleges, with the important distinction that every student at Upsala must join one of the Thirteen Nations, and there is none of the snobbishness which is beginning to characterize some of our Greek-letter societies.

These Thirteen Nations all have buildings or rooms of their own, and each one is named after one of the provinces of Sweden, while a distinctive flag waving over the building shows what Nation inhabits it. The chief university building is worthy of any institution on either side of the Atlantic, but there is no great group of buildings or splendid quadrangle, and the first effect of Upsala as a university town is rather meager and disappointing. A homely brick building with a round tower at either end was formerly a royal palace, but is now used by the university.

Gustavus Adolphus, who had a hand in almost everything of importance in ancient Sweden, gave the university a splendid endowment, and sent back to it from his battlefields many of the spoils of war, among others a great library from Wurzburg, Germany. It is said that at the same time he forwarded the Twelve Apostles in silver and the golden Virgin Mary from the Wurzburg cathedral to the Swedish mint to be coined into kroner. He doubtless felt, like his great English prototype, Cromwell, that the apostles should “go about doing good.”

The chief treasure of Upsala is an old, time-worn parchment manuscript, in many respects the most interesting book in the world, for it is the only original Gothic manuscript extant and the only early source of information concerning the Gothic language, the oldest of all Teutonic tongues.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

The Castle at Upsala.

The manuscript contains a translation of the four Gospels in Gothic by Bishop Ulphilas. The good bishop died in the year 388, and this copy was made undoubtedly within a century of his death. Not only did Ulphilas make this translation, but he invented the Gothic alphabet, some of whose letters show his indebtedness to the Greek. The letters are stamped in silver upon purple parchment, while some of the capitals and more important words are in gold or otherwise illuminated.

It has been said: “The old monk who laboriously stamped this parchment with his single types, a letter at a time, little knew how near he came to inventing printing, yet had he only combined three or four types together and stamped a word at once, the great invention would have been made there and then.”

I am not so sure of this, for our modern printing-press uses letters set one at a time, as the old monk used his hot metal types. But evidently the world was not yet ripe for Gutenburg and his printing-press, and it had to wait another thousand years for the invention that opened the aristocratic halls of learning to the democracy of the world. A saying of Max MÜller’s is worth quoting for you here: “To come to Upsala,” he says, “and not see the Codex Argenteus would be like going to the Holy Land without seeing the Holy Grave.”

I am glad that the guardians of the Codex are fully alive to its unique value. Every night, in its silver case, it is locked up in a fire and burglar-proof safe, for the authorities remember that many years ago a watchman stole ten leaves of the Codex. For twenty years they were lost, and only on his death-bed the thief confessed his folly and drew them out from the pillow beneath his head. Such a theft seems to me a good deal like stealing a red-hot stove, or, perhaps the Mona Lisa, for how a thief could expect to dispose of any of these treasures or profit by them without discovery is a mystery.

Another building here, to which I must not fail to introduce you, is the splendid cathedral, the noblest church in Sweden and the historic center of the kingdom. It has recently been so thoroughly restored that all the old cathedral has been renovated out of it, except its memories and its tombs. Yet from the modern standpoint it is a magnificent building, nearly four hundred feet long, and with three beautiful Gothic spires that soar as many feet into the air.

The tombs have interested me the most, however. Here lies Gustavus Vasa, in a granite sarcophagus between his two wives, who in effigy lie on either side of him, while no thoughts of jealousy or rivalry stir their granite hearts. Here, too, is the charming philosopher and naturalist, LinnÆus, whose statue in Stockholm I described, and Swedenborg, the great mystic, who could look into heaven and hell and describe what he saw there, and whose works, which have so strong a hold on a multitude of Americans to-day, are published and re-published in a multitude of languages.

I have been introducing you only to “new” Upsala, and to people and books that are not more than a thousand or fifteen hundred years old; but there is an old Upsala about three miles from the cathedral, which I have greatly enjoyed visiting. It is within easy walking distance on this bright June day, and I set out to find my own way to Gamla Upsala, which was not a difficult task in spite of my slight knowledge of the Swedish language, since the average Swede will take unlimited pains to tell a traveler what he wishes to know.

One of these polite gentlemen upon the street happened to hear me asking the way to Gamla Upsala. He was walking with his wife, and he told me to follow them and they would show me the way. I naturally supposed that they were going in that direction themselves, and trudged on behind them, since our limited knowledge of each other’s tongues did not allow much personal intercourse. They turned from one road into another, walking a good mile and a half, I should judge, until we came in sight of three singular mounds in the distance, a mile or more away. “These,” they said, pointing to them, “mark the site of Gamla Upsala.” Then they bade me a polite good afternoon and turned around to pursue their homeward journey. Apparently they had come all this way to show a solitary American the site of the ancient city and to make sure that he would not get lost on the straight and narrow road that leads to it.

As I approached the King’s Mounds, or Kungs HÖgar, I found that they were not unlike the Bin Tepe, or the Graves of the Thousand Kings on the Lydian plain, near old Sardis in Asia Minor. To be sure the tumuli of Lydia are for the most part far larger than the mounds of Gamla Upsala. Still these are very considerable tumuli, about sixty feet high and two hundred and twenty-five feet in diameter.

They are called the Mounds of Odin, Thor, and Frey, but you must not suppose, Judicia, that the old viking gods are buried here. By the way, where do you suppose such mythical personages are buried? But someone, not knowing who the ancient occupants of these graves might be, gave them these names, which certainly add to the interest of Gamla Upsala. I almost felt, as I scrambled to the top of Odin’s Hill, which is the largest of the three, that I was standing on the grave of one of the ancient gods.

Of course inquisitive moderns have not allowed the ancient bones in these tombs to rest in peace, but all that they found when they opened them were the half-burnt remains of some old kings whose names and dates nobody is wise enough to know, together with some pieces of gold and copper ornaments, some glass dishes, and bones of the kings’ horses and dogs, all of which were burnt apparently in the same great holocaust which consumed his mortal remains. Whether his wives had to share the fate of his horses and dogs, deponent saith not.

There is another interesting mound not far from Odin’s tumulus. It is twenty feet lower than his grave and has a large level space on the top. This is the hill where the ancient, open-air parliament was held and where, as late as the days of Gustavus Vasa, the kings were accustomed to address the people.

Gamla Upsala is now a very small hamlet with a little stone church, whose high and narrow windows and massive tower make it look more like a fort than a sanctuary. Upon this spot, we are told, once stood a splendid temple to the stalwart old gods who have given their names to the tumuli—Odin, Thor, and Frey. It is only a little more than a hundred years since this temple was destroyed and since priests still offered sacrifices, perhaps of human victims.

Let me close my story of Gamla Upsala with a sentence from the story of Adam of Bremen, who wrote his Chronicle in the very last days of heathendom, about the year 1070. “In this sacred house,” he says, “which everywhere is adorned with gold, the people worship the images of three gods, and this so that Thor, who is the mightiest of them, occupies the seat of honor in the middle, while Odin and Frey have their places on each side of him. When pest or famine is at hand, they offer to Thor’s image; when it is war, to Odin’s; at wedding celebrations, to Frey.”[3] Adam also relates that near the temple stood a grove in which the bodies of victims, human beings as well as beasts, were hung up, “and this grove is sacred in the eyes of the heathen.” He says that “every tree in it is held to be divine on account of the death or blood of those offered there.” What a tremendous gap in the history of the world is indicated by the little distance between Odin’s Mound and that homely Christian church! What a tremendous advance from the big Gamla Upsala of the eleventh century to the little Gamla Upsala of the twentieth!

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

NINTH LETTER

Which tells of Swedish lakeland; the commodious craft on which one sails through it; with some side remarks on the coinage of the country and the honesty of the people. Returns to the four great lakes, and tells of hill-climbing by steamer and going down hill by the same route across Vettern and Venern until the falls of TrollhÄtten and Gotenburg are reached.

Lake Venern, June 20.

My dear Judicia,

While I am sailing across this magnificent lake I must indite another epistle to you, telling you of the fascinations of Swedish lakeland. There will be plenty of time, too, to write you all about it, for Lake Venern is eighty miles long, the largest lake, if I am not mistaken, in all Europe, and our steamer traverses almost its whole length. Let me advise you, if you ever have another long holiday, to spend it among Sweden’s lakes. You have seen the Swiss lakes more than once, and the Italian lakes and the Cumberland Lake region of England, but in many respects Sweden’s lakes surpass them all in size, in picturesqueness, and in the convenient and delightful way one may get from one to the other. It is true that there is no Mount Pilatus in Sweden, or Monte Rosa, but there are other charms which fully make up for the lack of the mountain scenery one finds in France and Italy. And as for the little “waters” which one finds in Cumberland, they pale into insignificance beside these great reservoirs of the purest, most translucent water on the earth’s surface.

But the great advantage that they have over every other lake region in the world is that you can see all the great lakes in a three-days’ journey without leaving the very comfortable steamer on which you embark at Stockholm.

At Lucerne you can have a fine excursion on the VierwaldstÄttersee, but, unless you come back by land, you must return by the same route to Lucerne. Your steamer cannot climb the hills and get over into Lake Geneva, or strike across country and find its way into Lake Thun and Lake Brienz; but that is just what you can do in Sweden. You can journey clear across the lower end of Scandinavia, from the Baltic to the Kattegat, passing through a continuous succession of the most delightful scenes, through rivers and canals, across lake after lake, past ancient castles that will tell you the whole story of Sweden, until at last you come out on the western sea and land at Sweden’s second greatest city, Gotenburg. In this journey you even climb some considerable hills without leaving your stateroom, unless you choose, or your comfortable seat on the steamer’s deck, and at some places in your journey you are more than three hundred feet above your starting point on the Baltic, or your arrival point on the Kattegat.

But let us begin at the beginning, for this journey is worth describing in detail. To begin with, the craft on which we set sail is no little motor boat or steam launch, as you might imagine when I tell you of its ability to climb hills, but a very substantial and commodious little steamer, with quite elegant staterooms, upholstered abundantly in red satin, and with two wide berths and ample toilet accommodations.

What a travesty it is, Judicia, to speak of many of the steamer cabins even on Atlantic steamers as “staterooms.” Rooms of state! Call them vaults, closets, or any other appropriate name. But, really, it is not very much of an exaggeration to call the cabins on the great GÖta Canal line of Sweden staterooms. They are quite good enough for statesmen of average quality, and even royalty need not object to them for a three days’ occupancy.

The berths are not one above the other, to which the unfortunate man in the upper berth must climb by a precarious ladder, but are on either side of the room, and make very comfortable lounges by day. The table, too, on these steamers, is everything that could be desired; but that is to be taken for granted in Sweden. The SmÖrgÅsbord is abundant and varied, and the hot dishes are always admirably cooked. When your meal is finished you simply write down on a long account book which hangs on the wall what you have had, whether merely coffee (which includes all the cakes and sweet bread that you wish), or SmÖrgÅsbord, or perhaps a full dinner.

At the end of the voyage the amount is reckoned up, and the cashier takes your word for what you have eaten. You are very likely to be surprised at the smallness of your bill, whether she is or not.

This trustfulness in your probity tempts me to dilate upon the refreshing honesty of these Scandinavian nations. Especially if you come direct from Italy, the contrast is most refreshing. You never have to scan your bills and add up the items to see that the cashier has not slipped in a few extra francs for his or her perquisite. You need not even count your change, unless you want to make sure that the change-maker has not cheated himself. You need never bite your money or ring it on the pavement to be certain that it is not bad; or examine the date on the coins to find out whether the smiling clerk who gives you the change is not working off some obsolete coins on you which you cannot honestly dispose of without a loss of fifty per cent.

In Scandinavia a kroner is a kroner and an Öre is an Öre, and I should be as much surprised to find a bad coin in any of these kingdoms as to find one of the unmentionable little creatures, so common in some other countries, in a Scandinavian bed.

The coinage of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway is interchangeable. At any bank in any of the three kingdoms, or at any store where you may trade, you will receive money that is good in every other place, from KorsÖr to Hammerfest.

Each of these three kingdoms had its own money, with the head of its king stamped on its own coins, and its bank notes issued by its own banks. But Denmark’s money is exactly the same value as Sweden’s, and Sweden’s of precisely the same worth as Norway’s, and the money of each passes current at its face value in all.

If, my dear Judicia, you will bring this idea of an assimilated currency to the attention of all the great nations, and persuade them to accept it, you will confer an enormous boon upon every traveler.

During this monetary discussion we have not made much headway along the GÖta Canal. Now I will make up for lost time. A few minutes after our steamer left the quay at Stockholm we found ourselves among the islands of beautiful Lake MÄlar, famous in Sweden’s story, but before long we came to the deep cut by which the waters of the lake join a bay of the Baltic. Lake MÄlar covers nearly five hundred square miles, and though less than a fifth part as large as Lake Venern, it is yet one of the greatest lakes in Europe. Let me at least make you acquainted with the names of Sweden’s four inland seas, which ought to be as familiar to a traveler like yourself, as Lake Como or Maggiore. They are the Venern, the Vettern, the Hjelmar, and MÄlar.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

The Locks, Borenshult, GÖta Canal.

Mr. Von Heidenstam, in Swedish Life in Town and Country, says: “It is a common saying that you cannot stand on any given spot in these districts without having a lake in view somewhere, for by the side of the giant lakes smaller ones abound, spread over the face of the whole country. Of the hundred and ten millions of acres forming the surface of the country, over eight and a half millions are covered by lakes. Large and small, they dot the green earth with blue wherever the eye turns. The peasants call them the ‘eyes of the earth,’ and limpid and blue they are, like the eyes of the northern maidens.”

If you will consult the map you will easily understand our tortuous but delightful course across southern Sweden from Stockholm to Gotenburg.

The deep cut which I have told you about that leads from Lake MÄlar to the Baltic Sea was soon passed (for in order to reach the great canal we must first get into the Baltic), and we found ourselves sailing among the beautiful islands and past the charming villas which dot the coast in this region. A few hours more and we entered another long, narrow gulf or fjord, until at NorrkÖping we struck the canal again. Before long we came to the fifteen steps by which our steamer climbs from little Lake Roxen to the level of the Vettern.

This is indeed the most delightful hill-climbing that I have ever enjoyed. From one lock to another the steamer rises, while the passengers can either stay on deck or they can get off and stroll up on foot.

We had plenty of time to visit Vreta Klosterkyrka, which is celebrated as the place where Ebba Leijonhufvud spent her widowhood and died in 1549. I do not know that Ebba was particularly celebrated for her exploits or for beauty of face or form, but she was the mother-in-law of Gustavus Vasa, and even that oft-derided relationship adds an interest to the place.

The beautiful church, which is built upon the ruins of the old cloister, contains the ashes of several kings, but these old forgotten worthies are not of so much interest as the coffins that we saw in another chapel of the church. There are five of them, piled one above the other, and each one contains a Douglas. The most famous Douglas of them all, a younger son of the head of the great Scottish clan, fought under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War. For his bravery he was made a Swedish count, and many a Swedish noble with Douglas blood in his veins lives in Sweden to-day.

By the time we had sauntered slowly up the hill and had visited the site of Gustavus Vasa’s mother-in-law’s cloister, and ruminated sufficiently on the past, we were ready to take the steamer again for another lovely sail down an arm of Lake Vettern to Vadstena, and here we had time enough to go ashore and see another castle of Gustavus Vasa’s, who seems to have sprinkled his residences all over this part of Sweden. Here, we are told, “he celebrated his marriage with his third wife, Catarina, a blushing bride of sixteen, though the bridegroom was almost four times as old, and this, too, notwithstanding that the girl was already betrothed to a noble youth, and ran away and hid herself in her father’s garden when the old king came to court her.”[4]

In Vadstena are two churches, each some five hundred years old, one of which is famous as the last resting place of St. Bridget, to whom I have already introduced you, for here she had founded the celebrated nunnery, whose inmates had to take such strict, ascetic vows.

Across Lake Vettern we sailed through another canal, that led us between charming pastures, musical with the tinkle of cowbells; past fine farms, the red farmhouse making a spot of color on the rich green turf; past gently wooded hills, until we came to magnificent Lake Venern. But we had to get downhill before we reached the Kattegat, for we were one hundred and forty-four feet above the sea, and eleven great locks, each of them one hundred and twelve feet long, is the stairway by which we descended.

Since it took some time for our steamer to go down the hill, we walked instead, for we get many a glimpse from the shore of some of the most beautiful rapids I have ever seen. These are the falls of TrollhÄtten. Is not that a name that lingers upon your lips and suggests all sorts of trolls and sprites and water nymphs? A tremendous volume of water comes rushing down over the falls, for Europe’s largest lake, as I have before told you, here empties itself, or rather throws itself into the sea. Except for its one majestic fall, Niagara cannot show us anything more exciting in the way of cataracts than TrollhÄtten. There are five of them, the smallest twenty-five feet high, and the biggest forty-two feet of steep incline, while the river is lined on either side by jagged rocks and high cliffs, past which it comes surging and swirling with deafening roar, hurling its spray high in the air.

I wish the poet-laureate Southey had seen the falls at TrollhÄtten and had expended some of his adjectives upon them instead of wasting them all upon that little streamlet at the end of Derwent Water when he wrote “How the Waters come down at Lodore.”

At the foot of the falls we took the steamer again for a few hours’ sail down the GÖta River, until we came to Sweden’s greatest commercial city, Gotenburg, where steamers are waiting to carry Sweden’s products and Sweden’s emigrants to the ends of the earth.

I fear I may have given you the impression, as I have described the getting up and downhill across Sweden’s broad southern end, of merely a holiday waterway, but the GÖta Canal is the great artery of Sweden. Through it, up and down these gigantic steps, pass twelve thousand vessels every year, some of them steamers capable of making an Atlantic voyage, some of them full-rigged schooners or brigs.

The charm of the trip, too, is not by any means confined to the scenery or the ancient castles, for our fellow passengers, by their gentle politeness, do much to make the journey memorable. If you had been with us, they would have taken pains to find out any titles which the American colleges may have incautiously conferred upon your husband, and would always address you as the “Lady Doctor.” They would not think of using the word ni (you) in addressing you. We are told about one of the young lady clerks in a great store in Stockholm who sent word to a gentleman that his son had insulted her. On asking the girl what the insult was, she replied: “He addressed me as ni.” I am speaking now of the way in which chance acquaintances or strangers address one another.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

The Gorge of the GÖta at TrÖlhatten.

But now and then, as we hear our fellow passengers talking together, we notice a peculiarly affectionate stress of accent upon the little word du, and we know that the two men who are talking together are fast friends, or they would never address each other as “thou.” “The event marks an important stage in their friendship, it is said, and is accompanied by a little ceremony. The higher in rank, or the elder of the two, says, ‘Let us lay aside our titles.’ Pouring out bumpers (let us hope it is always in Sweden’s temperance beverage), they stand erect, and clinking glasses drink the brothers’ Skol. Then, grasping each other warmly by the hand, they say: ‘Thanks, brother.’ Thereafter they are ‘du brothers’; they always address each other as du, or ‘brother.’”

This custom of fosterbrÖdralag, or foster brotherhood, is as old as Sweden itself, but in olden times the foster brothers instead of clinking glasses cut gashes in their arms and let their blood mingle together as it fell to the earth, a too strenuous ceremony for these milder-mannered days.

Have I not told you enough, Judicia, to prove the proposition with which I set out: that there is no more charming journey in the world, when we consider the scenery, the historic associations, our means of conveyance, and our fellow passengers, than this trip through Sweden’s magnificent GÖta Canal?

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

TENTH LETTER

Describes the ancient city of Visby; the Gotlanders of old; their wonderful wealth; their defeat by King Valdemar, and the vats of gold that he demanded for the city’s ransom. Returning to more modern days, Midsummer’s Day, the great holiday of Sweden, is described.

Visby, June 24.

My dear Judicia,

Please refer to the map once more, and you will see in the blue water, nearly halfway between the Swedish coast and the Baltic province of Russia, a long, scraggly island, with many capes and indentations. You will see that it is called Gotland, and on its western shore you will see that there is a city called Visby. I do not know that I can give such a traveler and geographer as yourself any real information about Gotland, but I will at least venture to refresh your memory concerning this most interesting island, for a very considerable part of the world’s history for a good many scores of years centered in this piece of sea-washed land, which contains barely twelve hundred square miles of surface.

At one time Visby, which has now dwindled to a somewhat obscure tourist resort, was the London of northern Europe. The East and the West paid their tribute to it. Russia sent her timber and her furs, and England and Germany and Flanders their precious stuffs, which were here exchanged for other precious stuffs and then went their several ways to all parts of Europe.

One of their old ballads tells us:

“The Gotlanders weigh their gold with twenty pound weights,

And play with choicest jewels,

The pigs eat out of silver troughs,

And the women spin with golden distaffs.”

That the old ballad had some foundation in fact is shown us by the splendid ruins that tell us of Visby’s former greatness.

Throughout Gotland there are no less than ninety great Gothic churches, most of them in ruins, while in Visby alone were sixteen of these churches, some of them among the largest in Europe. So much has the city dwindled that in only one of these churches is heard the voice of prayer and praise to-day. The walls of ten others can still be seen, but they are merely magnificent ruins.

That the ancient Gotlanders were proud of their splendid isolation, in the middle of the Baltic, and were not inclined to bend the supple knee to any potentate, is indicated by a tradition that has come down to us, of the ambassador whom these island people sent to the king of Sweden to seek an alliance for mutual offense and defense. This ambassador was named Strabagn, which being interpreted means “Long Legs.”

When he reached Upsala, where was then the royal palace, he found the king and queen dining in their great banquet hall. The king had a grudge against the Gotlanders, whom he considered too toplofty and independent, and so Mr. Longfellow was kept standing in the hall while the royal pair continued their sumptuous meal. At last the king condescended to ask gruffly, “What’s the news from Gotland?” “Nothing” replied Strabagn, “except that a mare on the island has foaled three colts at a birth.” “Ah,” said the king, “and what does the third colt do when the other two are sucking?” “He does as I do,” answered Long Legs; “he stands and looks on.” This stroke of wit pleased the king and queen so much that they invited the ambassador to make a third at their table, and were finally willing to conclude a treaty which was as much to the advantage of Sweden as of Gotland.

The thirteenth century was the Golden Age of Gotland. In this century the great warehouses were built, and it became the commercial metropolis of northern Europe. There were few stronger fortresses in the world, for an enormous stone wall thirty feet high surrounded the city, and from the wall no less than forty-eight huge towers arose.

It does not take much imagination to reproduce ancient Visby, for thirty-eight of the forty-eight towers are still standing. They are more than sixty feet high, and one can see in each of the five stories the holes through which the archers fired their arrows, doubtless winged with death for many a foe, while from the battlemented top of the towers huge stones were thrown from the catapults.

But in spite of Visby’s isolation, and in spite of her mighty fortifications, she was not impregnable as she supposed, for in 1361 Denmark, which in those early days seems to have always been the evil genius of Sweden, sent an army under the command of King Valdemar Atterdag to capture the city. The people behind their strong fortifications at first laughed at him and mustered all their troops to defend the city, but Valdemar was victorious, nearly two thousand of Visby’s noblest defenders were slain, and the city was at the mercy of the Dane.

He would not accept its surrender and accord it the honors of war, even after it had capitulated, but tore down a part of the wall to prove his ruthless might and marched as a conqueror to the center of the city.

One is reminded by Valdemar’s conquest of the hard terms that Pizarro made when he conquered the Peruvians. You remember that for the ransom of King Atahualpa he went into a great room, and drawing a red mark on the wall as high as he could reach he told the Peruvians that they must fill that room with gold as high as the red mark if they would release their king from bondage and save him from death.

King Valdemar did something of the same sort to the Visbyites, for he took the three biggest ale vats that he found in the city and commanded the people to fill them with gold and silver within three hours. So frightened were the inhabitants by his bloodthirsty cruelty that they obeyed, stripping themselves of their golden ornaments, rifling their churches and their treasure-houses, until the big vats were full to the brim.

But even this did not avail to save them from further rapine, for Valdemar made a clean sweep of all that was left and poor Visby was plundered by the rapacious troops of all her riches.

I should like to be able to tell you that I saw the bones of Valdemar Attardag safely encoffined where he could do no more harm, but the next best thing was to see the Jungfrutornet, or the “Maiden’s Tower,” where, according to tradition, the noble maid who opened the gates of Visby to the Danish king, whom she loved, was walled up alive. You need not waste much sympathy on this maiden, however, for I am told on good authority that she is a strictly mythical girl, and that her story was invented by the people of Visby to account for what many believed was a somewhat cowardly capitulation of the city to the Danes.

King Valdemar, however, must have had one or two redeeming traits of character, for he erected a great stone cross on the battlefield to commemorate the death of the eighteen hundred citizens whom he slew. The cross can still be seen, scarcely marred by the passage of these five hundred years, and the inscription on it is not a record of triumph so much as a memorial to the dead.

You have noticed, perhaps, that this letter is dated “June 24.” This date may not have any great significance for you, but it is a high day in Sweden, perhaps the most joyous of all the year, for it is Midsummer’s Day, the day without a night in many parts of this northern land.

In almost every village in Sweden you will see to-day a Majstang. Perhaps you can guess that a Majstang is a Maypole, though I think I hear you say, “Why have a Maypole in June?” The Swedish word for May, Maj, is an ancient term meaning “green leaf,” and June 24 is preËminently the Feast of the Green Leaf.

It is not the somber evergreens, however, that decorate the windows at Christmas time and that stand dressed with Christmas candles and Christmas gifts; the Midsummer Tree is the birch. If it should ever be put to a vote in Sweden, I think the Swedes would decide that the birch is their most beloved tree. It is equally beautiful in summer and in winter. In the former its delicate drooping branches are covered with green, and in the latter with white. There is nothing quite so lovely in the northern latitudes as the birch trees silvered with a thick coating of frost in midwinter, unless it be these same birch trees in their glad green livery in midsummer.

On June 23, in preparation for Midsummer’s Day, all the lads and lassies that you see in the country will have a load of birch boughs on their shoulders. In Stockholm hundreds of wagons and little steamers bring tens of thousands of young birch trees to the city, and every window and doorway is decorated with its delicate green. Even the dray horses are decked out in green, and “the wearing of the green” is more popular in Sweden on June 24 than in Ireland on March 17.

This is the out-of-door festival of the country. At LuleÅ in the far north the people all flock on Midsummer’s Eve to a mountain near by called Mjaolkudds Berget. Here each family builds a small bonfire and over it makes their coffee, which is supposed to have a peculiar flavor and potency on Midsummer’s Eve. The midnight sun cannot quite be seen from Mjaolkudds Berget, but according to the ancient custom the coffeepot must be placed on the hot coals just as the last rim of his upper disk disappears. Before the coffee is brewed, the upper disk is again visible above the horizon, and then the coffee can be drunk by every member of the family, from the great-grandmother to the youngest scion.

This of all days is a day of life and color in Sweden. Let us not stay in little Visby, with its mournful ruins reminding us of the golden days of Gotland, but go out into the country, for nature is ever fresh and new. She knows nothing about ruins, or, if she does allow some giant tree to totter and fall in the forest, she soon covers up his decaying form with moss and creepers. The colors that we see are not all green by any means, for this is the day when Swedish maidens adopt the bright, ancient costumes of their country, the Crown Princess herself having set the example. The Maypole is set up on every village green, and the children first are given the right of way. Hand in hand they romp around the Maypole, singing the folk songs and the glees which Sweden’s children for many a generation have sung on Midsummer’s Day. Then the older ones take their place, and all is motion and gladness and color and song.

If we should find ourselves in the woods after the day’s festivities are over, we should very likely see some silent, solitary maidens wandering through the fields, in the long twilight which here lasts till midnight. Do not think that they are lovelorn lasses deserted by their swains, for they are simply seeking to know their own fortunes, which Midsummer’s Night reveals to them. In one of the provinces the maiden must pick three flowers each, of three different kinds, and must speak to no one until the next morning. These flowers she puts under her pillow when she goes to bed, and if she has been conscientiously tongue-tied, and has been quite alone when she picked the flowers, and has replied to every question which teasing suitors would put to her only by signs, she will dream of her future husband, and the next morning will know who he is to be.

In other provinces she has to pick nine different kinds of flowers from as many different farms, and this bouquet is even more efficacious than a smaller one. Why should we not have such a midsummer holiday in America? It is true that we have our Fourth of July, which is not very far from the right date, but, however “safe and sane” we may make it, the Fourth of July can never be anything but a patriotic holiday, nor should it be.

Thanksgiving Day is too late in the year for an out-of-door holiday, and the thirtieth of May is dedicated to a sacred celebration all its own. But why should we not have one genuine out-of-door day, a day when we shall see to it that every city child may romp and play in God’s green fields, and when we may make it a joyous duty to thank the Giver of all, not only for the harvests and for the full granaries as on Thanksgiving Day, but for the sun and the green trees and the flowers and grass and everything that makes us glad to be alive? What day could be so good for such a celebration in America as well as in Sweden as Midsummer’s Day?

Before we bid good-by to Gotland and Visby, let us climb in the late evening twilight the ruined towers of the church of St. Nikolaus. From the old wall we can look out to sea, and if our imagination is strong enough, supplemented by a sufficient knowledge of old traditions, perhaps we shall see an eerie, reddish light on the calm waters of the Baltic. This light comes from two great carbuncles in the bottom of the Baltic. These carbuncles once adorned the western gable of the church of St. Nikolaus, where, according to the tradition, “these carbuncles shone with the brightness of the sun at noonday, throughout the night, and served as guiding lights to storm-tossed mariners far out on the Baltic wave. Twenty-four soldiers stood constantly on guard to watch these ruddy gems, the most precious possessions of the church, and no one, on pain of death, might approach the sanctuary after the going down of the sun.”

Ruins of St. Nikolaus Cathedral, Visby, Gotland.

King Valdemar could not leave such priceless jewels to St. Nikolaus, and so he snatched them from the rose windows which they adorned, put them on his biggest ship, and sailed away to Denmark. But justice followed the sacrilegious freebooter; his ship was wrecked on one of the little islands which line the coast of Gotland, and the king himself barely escaped with his life. The carbuncles sank to the bottom of the sea, which accounts for that strange glow which any one with a vivid imagination can see from the ruined tower of St. Nikolaus as he looks off on the peaceful Baltic.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

ELEVENTH LETTER

Wherein something is told of Sweden’s art and artists; the ancient rock-cutting of Bohus; the art treasures collected by the heroes of the Thirty Years’ War; Cederstrom’s picture of Charles XII; Carl Larsson’s pictures of the home; the mural paintings of the schoolhouses; also something about Sweden’s great authors and singers.

Stockholm, June 30.

My dear Judicia,

With your love for libraries and picture galleries I should not dare to send you this last letter from Sweden without telling you something about the Swedes who have contributed to literature and art, though, if I should attempt to go into the subject exhaustively, I fear that many names of Swedish artists and authors would be unfamiliar even to you.

Sweden’s first and original art gallery is a strange one indeed, for it is unroofed except by the blue dome of heaven, and not a canvas hangs upon its walls. Nevertheless it is one of the most interesting galleries in all Europe. It is found in the province of Bohus, on the west coast of Sweden, north of Gotenburg. Shall we call these old artists sculptors or painters? The material that they used was the solid rock, the face of the cliffs that slopes up gently from level fields. They did not chisel out a statue, but with some bronze tools in lieu of brushes they cut the figures which they would portray in the rock, not making them stand out as does the Lion of Lucerne, but cutting them like solid intaglios in the face of the rock itself.

So shallow are the cuttings that water has to be poured upon them to bring the figures out from the gray rock in which they are cut, but as the water trickles down from the bucket which the stout maiden who acts as guide and guardian of this picture gallery splashes upon the rock, wonderful shapes appear: viking ships, some large enough to be manned by a crew of one hundred men, evidently the warships of the long ago; men on horseback and men on foot; men plowing with yokes of oxen, while now and then there towers above all the men and beasts a gigantic figure with an ax or a thunderbolt in his hand, no doubt the God of War under whose Ægis the old Northmen went out to battle.

The most common of these rock pictures are the representations of the viking ships, showing that in those days, as in these, the Scandinavians were great sea-faring people. The prows of these ancient piratical craft one often sees reproduced on the roofs of Swedish and Norwegian houses to-day. Of course these pictures are very crude, very much such as a child of five years of age would draw upon his slate to-day. But that is natural, for you must remember that they were drawn in the childhood of Scandinavia, at least twenty-five if not thirty-five hundred years ago, for it has been proved conclusively that they were chiseled by men of the Bronze Age of Sweden, which lasted from fifteen hundred to five hundred years before Christ.

We are very grateful to you, crude artists of the older time, for your pictures, for they tell us many things about ancient Sweden. They tell us that you sailed the seas in great ships rowed by a hundred men, though you do not seem to have known how to harness the winds to your craft, for we see no signs of masts or sails. We know that you had dogs and cows and horses, and that you plowed your fields with a crooked stick drawn by a pair of oxen. We know that you had carts that ran on two wheels, and that you were expert with spear and shield, and I venture to say that your art museum, old as it is to-day, will last longer than the Pitti or the Uffizi; and long after Macaulay’s New Zealander has gazed upon the ruins of London from his picturesque position upon the bridge, the pictures in your gallery will still lead mankind to speculate upon the kind of folk whom you chiseled in the everlasting rocks. No fire can destroy your gallery, no thief can steal your Mona Lisa, no conqueror can carry away your art treasures.

It is a far cry from the rock galleries of Bohus to the fine collections of old and new masters of which Stockholm and Gotenburg boast. Some of the finest pictures, too, are not found in the metropolis of either eastern or western Sweden, but in the palaces and castles which dot the interior of the country. I have already told you about some of these palaces like Skokloster and others, which contain Correggios and Titians and pictures of Paul Veronese, for in the Thirty Years’ War the mighty Swedish generals fell heir to many of the splendid picture galleries of southern Germany, and all they had to do was to pick out the best pictures by the greatest masters and send them to their northern home.

In those days “looting” was not “stealing,” at least in the eyes of the victors, and they had this excuse at least, that the pictures and works of art, if they had not taken them, would have fallen into worse hands. They would have reminded you that their great opponent Tilly, when he captured Heidelberg and destroyed the library, could find no better use for the most valuable manuscripts than to use them as a litter for his horses. In this way the Codex Argenteus, of which I have before written you, was taken when the Swedes captured Prague and sent on its far journey to Upsala.

I am afraid that most of the names of Swedish artists would hardly be recognized by you, though I think you would admire some of their paintings as much as I do. I have time and room in this letter to tell you of only two that greatly interested me.

Baron Cederstrom devoted himself to the period of Charles XII, whose tragic story you remember. Cederstrom’s greatest picture shows the body of the king borne on a stretcher by a dozen soldiers over the dreary, snow-covered, mountainous defiles that separate Norway from Sweden. “The pathos of this pitiable end to so glorious a career appears in the attitude of a solitary mountain huntsman, who, with his boy and dog, stands by the wayside as the procession passes. He is the only one to doff his fur cap and salute the remains of one who but a short time before made half Europe tremble, while the other half was lost in amazement at his extraordinary fortunes and prodigious victories.”

Another artist whose pictures are of unusual interest is Carl Larsson, the most popular artist in Sweden to-day. He is the painter of the home, of the fireside and the nursery, of the sitting room and the kitchen, of the boy and girl and the grandmother as well. His own son and daughter figure in many of his pictures.

One that especially impressed me was a canvas representing this same son and daughter gazing at a skull on the center table in their home. The look of serious half-comprehension on the girl’s face as she points out the skull to her brother, and of half-frightened awe with which he gazes at it, will not soon fade from my mind. Another portrait of his daughter leaning against a birch tree, the white bark and new leaves no purer than her own sweet face, is also a picture to be remembered. It has been copied upon so many postcards that the Swedes, at least, are not likely to forget it.

Mr. Von Heidenstam well characterized Larsson when he says: “His audacity, his love of novelty and adventure, the freshness of his impressions, the youthfulness of his enthusiasms, and his whole vision of life are Scandinavian to the core. In his pictures of home life, mostly taken from his own home, he is genial, happy, fond of bright colors, of flowers and sunshine, enraptured with existence, and prone to see its bright side.”

The Swedes are wise in not relegating all the paintings of their best artists to museums or picture galleries, which are seldom visited by the people, but many of the higher and even primary schools in Stockholm and other cities have been adorned with mural paintings by their best artists: Larsson, Prince Eugene, Oscar BjÖrck, Thegerstrom, and Nils Kreuger are all well-known painters, who have put some of their best work upon the walls of Sweden’s schoolhouses, picturing landscapes, national customs, and some of the great events in Sweden’s history, and placing them where Sweden’s children cannot help being impressed by them.

I cannot honestly say that the chief charm of Sweden consists in the spell which her artists have woven about her, and I suppose few people would come to Sweden to study art. Her real fascination lies in her glorious out-of-doors—in her noble forests, her shimmering lakes, her glorious snow fields and frost sculpture in winter, her rushing rivers and turbulent rapids—all these things I have tried to tell you about, and this is the raw material of the artist.

Compared with Italy or Spain, Sweden’s art is yet very young, but, with such models as nature’s lavish hands has furnished on every side, it seems to me very probable that the great artists of the future will be found in these Scandinavian lands.

I wish they would spend more time in Lapland in midwinter. I wish they would paint for us the little trees that Jack Frost converts into white coral every day. I wish they would paint for us the rare combination of sunrise and sunset, and the glowing sky where the sun never rises at all. I wish they would show him to us not only on the longest day of the year at midnight, as they have often done, but on the shortest days, as he peers timidly above the horizon, or goes bowling along for an hour or two on its very edge. These are pictures which no country but Sweden furnishes in their perfection, and pictures which the Swedish artist could most easily reproduce and which would make his canvas immortal.

The authors of Sweden are many and well beloved. I can name but two of them here, though I fear the Swedes will never forgive me if I do not mention Bellman, their Robert Burns, and some others. I pick out these two because they are as well beloved in America as in Sweden. TegnÉr is one of them. He may be called, perhaps, the Macaulay of Sweden, only his lays are not those of ancient Rome, but of ancient Sweden. Someone has said that “his heroic poems sent a thrill through old and young when first they were published.” He became popular throughout all Europe, and more than fifty translations of his poems are found in a dozen different European languages.

Longfellow made him known and loved by American readers by his beautiful translation of the Children of the Lord’s Supper. “The scene in the country church, decked out with flowers and evergreens for the solemn ceremony, the rustic boys and girls bowing and curtsying as they made their responses before the assembled congregation, and the attitude and words of the patriarchal pastor are all true to life.”

Another of your best-loved authors, Judicia, I must remind you, was also a Swede—Frederika Bremer. She was also more than a writer of charming tales. She was an ardent champion of woman’s rights, but I warrant you she would never have used dynamite in obtaining them, or have poured paint into letter boxes to secure “votes for women.” Her good work for their uplift is still carried on by the “Frederika Bremer Union.” It protects and encourages women who are struggling to make a place for themselves in the world, and seeks in every way to raise the standard of woman’s work and wages. Our former American Minister, Mr. Thomas, gives an interesting account of a call he made upon her in 1864, nearly fifty years ago, only a year before her death:

“Up three flights of a stone stairway to a little landing, I make my way,” he says. “A curtsying Swedish maid answers my knock and shows me into a cozy sitting room. Presently a little old woman with a decided stoop in her shoulders enters and meets me with extended hand and a pleasant smile, bidding me welcome with one of the sweetest voices I ever listened to. This was one forenoon in January, 1864. The cozy sitting room was in Stockholm in the fourth story of a brick house, on the long Drottning-Gatan, and the little old woman was Frederika Bremer, the great Swedish novelist.”

This was in the darkest period of our Civil War. Mr. Thomas asked Miss Bremer for her autograph for the Sanitary Commission Fair, soon to be held in New York, explaining that the proceeds would be devoted to the sick and wounded soldiers. “It will give me real joy,” she said, “to do anything to help on liberty in America, or to comfort the soldiers who have become disabled in fighting for it.” Her eyes beamed brightly as she spoke, and her whole manner showed how actively she was interested in our cause and country.

“This interesting tÊte-À-tÊte gave me the best opportunity for observing Miss Bremer,” continues Mr. Thomas. “The stoop of her shoulders was hid in the ample cushions of her easy chair. A neat, white lace cap covered her head. Her gray hair was brushed straight back from a noble, lofty forehead, white as marble, and her mild blue eyes beamed with a tender compassion that made one forget the great author in the sympathizing friend and compelled me to call her beautiful, for beauty of soul shone forth in every glance.”

I have quoted this intimate description, for there are few living Americans who have actually seen and talked with the gentle authoress, and I fear me there are few Americans who read her books to-day, but you have not forgotten how, in our early days, her pure and wholesome novels were justly admired and loved.

Do you remember the little girl who for some childish misdemeanor was shut up in a dark closet as a punishment, and how she found there Miss Bremer’s Home Life, and how she lay down at full length on the floor, placing the book as near the crack of the door as she could, reading the story nearly half through before the time of her punishment had expired? She gained more from her punishment than anyone but herself knew, for Frederika Bremer’s charming picture of home life remained with her as an inspiration through all her life.

Speaking of our early days, Judicia, I was reminded that we must belong to a former generation when I asked Aylmer when we were together in LuleÅ what he knew about Jenny Lind, the great Swedish soprano. Would you believe it, he had never heard of her? The singer who made the greatest sensation in America of anyone that ever crossed the ocean; the singer who was as good as she was beautiful, and whose voice was no purer or sweeter than her life! We at least know how the ticket offices were besieged by eager thousands who wished to hear her voice, and what extravagant prices, as they were then considered, were paid for her concerts. And yet Aylmer had never heard of this most famous of all northern warblers, of this great philanthropist, as she became in her later life! Moreover he confided to me that he had never heard of Christine Nilsson, a more modern singer of almost equal fame. Well, well, we must be growing antiquated!

There is one man who to be sure cannot be classed as an artist or an author, and yet I suppose he has done more for literature as well as for science and the cause of peace than any other man in Sweden. This is Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, an article which we chiefly associate with war, but which has really done more to revolutionize mining and engineering. Thanks to dynamite, it has been possible to bore the mighty tunnels through the Alps; to knock down the iron mountains of northern Sweden and send them off piecemeal to other parts of the earth; to dig the subways of New York and Boston and Chicago, and to tunnel the North River for the commuters of Manhatten. No man ever did more good with his vast wealth, or disposed of it more wisely when he died, than Alfred Nobel, and now each year magnificent awards of some forty thousand dollars each are given by this foundation to people who have achieved great things in physics, in medicine, in literature, and for peace.

You will observe, Judicia, that I have not bored you with any stories of Swedish games and sports, of skiing and ski jumping, of bobsleighing and rodeling, and that I have not even alluded to Swedish gymnastics. There is a method in my seeming madness, for though I am much interested in these matters, especially in the out-of-door sports, I am not quite so wild about them as is Aylmer, and, since they are common to all Scandinavia, I will leave them for him to describe and thus give his Norway a great advantage, when you come to hold the scales of justice between the eastern and western lands of the peninsula. But I beg you to remember that Sweden is quite as famous in these particulars as her sister kingdom across the mountains.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

TWELFTH LETTER

Relates to Finland; why it should be included in Scandinavia; its earlier and later history; its degradation by Russia; the charming journey from Stockholm to Åbo; and tells of a winter adventure in the Gulf of Bothnia.

Åbo, Finland, July 1.

My dear Judicia,

I wonder if you are asking why I include Finland in the letters which we submit to you in regard to the relative merits of the different parts of Scandinavia. Do I hear you say that Finland is a part of Russia, and that the Finns are not even of Aryan stock like the Swedes, but are descendants of Turanian tribes, “first cousins to the Hungarians, and forty-second cousins to the Turks”?

Nevertheless, in spite of all this, I must maintain that Finland is more a part of Scandinavia and more nearly related to the Swedes in customs, temperament, and manner of life than to any other nation. The Swedes were the people who found the Finns in barbaric heathenism, who Christianized and civilized them, though it must be acknowledged that, in doing this, they conquered and sometimes exploited them at the same time. For four hundred and fifty years after this conquest by Sweden the Finns constituted a loyal and devoted part of the Swedish kingdom, speaking the Swedish language almost as freely as their own, adopting Swedish laws and customs, and equal in political and social rights to their neighbors across the Gulf of Bothnia.

It was only about a hundred years ago that they were conquered by the Russians, when, after centuries of struggle, Sweden’s domains were rent in twain.

To prove my contention that to all intents and purposes Finland should be considered a part of Scandinavia, I must remind you that long before the Finns came to Finland the southern part of their country was doubtless inhabited by Scandinavians. One writer tells us that they were there “thousands of years before the Finns arrived.” But way off beyond Persia were some Turanian tribes, related to the Mongols and the Manchus, who started on that everlasting trek toward the west, which, since the days of the Pharaohs, seems to have urged the Eastern peoples on toward the setting sun.

They seem to have tarried in Persia for awhile and to have brought with them some Persian coins, which to this day are occasionally unearthed in Finland. On and on they pressed, the first of the Eastern hordes to cross the Ural mountains, until they came, some to the banks of the Danube and others to the shores of the Baltic. The tribes who settled the fertile plains of Hungary are the Magyars of to-day; those who pushed on to the Baltic Sea are the Finns.

Eric XI of Sweden was the first king to turn his attention particularly toward Finland. He seems to have desired not only the conquest of the Finns but their conversion to Christianity, and so he is known both as King Eric and St. Eric. It was no easy job, however, to conquer this slow, obstinate, patient race, and it was one hundred and fifty years, or, to be exact, in 1293, that Sweden’s conquest was complete. She soon set an example to all future conquerors, an example by which Great Britain has so well profited in these later days by giving perfect liberty to the conquered peoples and confirming their liberties by an irrevocable law.

Nothing better ever happened to the Finns than this conquest by the Swedes. Christianity, civilization, education, and an invaluable training in liberty under law was the result, until the descendants of those wild tribes from the steppes of Asia have become one of the most civilized, enlightened, and perhaps the best educated nation in the world.

Says Ernest Young, in his interesting book on Finland: “It is a remarkable fact that the Finnish and Swedish populations of Finland, though running like two different streams beside each other without blending, never rose against each other, but, on the contrary, always stood side by side in the same rank whenever sword was drawn at home or abroad. There was rivalry between them, but no oppression.… The laws and social order of Sweden were introduced without resistance into a country where law and society did not exist before. The people grew into these new forms, applied them according to their characters, and became familiar with them as their own.”

Would that Russia could have learned a lesson that Sweden taught to all the world, concerning conquered provinces. At first it seemed as though she had done so, and no one ever spoke fairer words to a conquered people than Czar Alexander I spoke to the Finns through the Governor-general in the “Act of Assurance,” given to the first Finnish Diet that convened after the cession of Finland to Russia by the Swedes.

At first it seemed as though these fair promises would be fulfilled, and for a time, doubtless, Finland was better off under Russian rule than she had been during the hundreds of years previously when she had been the battleground, continually tramped over by Swedish and Russian soldiers, and reddened with their blood as well as by that of her own citizens.

Each succeeding Czar seems to have treated Finland according to his own whims, or those of his prime minister, and with little consideration to the fundamental laws of the land so solemnly guaranteed and sworn to by each Czar as he came to the throne.

Little by little the Russians have been filching away the liberties of the Finns, depriving them of one boon after another, and ever threatening them with still direr evils. Finnish soldiers are no longer allowed to enlist for the defense of their fatherland, but instead they must pay a tribute to Russia and allow uncleanly Russian soldiers to be quartered in the beautiful barracks built for their own troops. Finnish stamps are no longer good for letters that go outside of Finland, and the marks and pennys in which they have reckoned their currency from time immemorial must give way to the more awkward ruble and kopeck with which they would prefer to have nothing to do.

In mean and picayunish ways the government interferes with their liberties. For instance, the people voted not long ago for the prohibition of alcoholic drinks, but the Czar, in his superior wisdom, doubtless absolutely inspired by his ministers, decreed that prohibition was not good for the Finns (and very likely not good for the Russian revenues), and so vetoed the law which had met with universal favor.

The Finnish Diet meets in a rather shabby and antequated building, but the people have obtained a good site for a new parliament house and have raised the money for the construction of a splendid building that would ornament the fine city of Helsingfors. Now the Czar tells them that they cannot afford a new building, and withholds his approval, so that they cannot do what they please with their own money. Some think that since he has had no use for a Finnish parliament, and soon intends to suppress it altogether, he sees no use for a parliament house.

The Finns number only three millions of people, and the Russians on their very borders, people of an alien race and an alien religion, who have scarcely yet emerged from barbarism, are more than a hundred million strong, and that tells the whole story.

The trek that was begun by the Finns before the Christian Era has been again taken up since Russia began to stamp out their liberties. More than three hundred thousand of them have come to our shores, and no people should receive a heartier welcome in Yankee land than they.

“In 1894 a statue to their beloved Czar, Alexander II, was unveiled at Helsingfors, a statue which is one of the noblest works of art in the capital and which is still often decorated with wreaths and flowers by the grateful Finns. It is almost unbelievable that when this statue was unveiled the Governor-general forbade the singing of an ode written for that occasion, because he took the phrase ‘The Father of Finnish liberties’ to imply a condemnation of his less enlightened successor.”

Perhaps you would like to read a translation of one verse of this ode, which tells of the gratitude of the Finnish people to the one who restored their liberties, while at the same time it shows how far removed from such praise is a government which could prohibit the singing of such a hymn. Here is the first verse:

“Hail noble prince! From town and land

Our greetings come, from isle and strand,

From forest, hill and dale.

Wherever Finland’s folks may rest,

Their debt for all they value best,

In love to thee they pay.”

This excursion into Swedish history is longer than I intended, and has prevented me from telling you before that I left Stockholm last night on one of the delightful little steamers that ply across the Gulf of Bothnia from Sweden’s capital to Åbo, the ancient capital of Finland.

It is a charming sail. Much of the time we were within sight of land, and some of the most picturesque land in the world. A perfect swarm of islands of all sizes and shapes guard the coasts both of Finland and Sweden. Some of these islands are tree-clad down to the water’s edge; others are bare, gaunt, smooth rocks, whose surface has been washed by ten thousand storms—I was about to say ten thousand tides when I remembered that the Baltic is almost a tideless sea. It is a sea, too, that is being constantly conquered by the land, for, through some unexplained action of mighty subterranean forces, without volcanic shock or earthquake tremor, the land both of the Swedish and Finnish shores is gradually rising. On the northern end of the Baltic the land gains on the water at the rate of about four feet in a hundred years, and that the sea is at a very different level from what it was some thousands of years ago is shown by the fact that the remains of viking ships are found on the tops of very considerable hills at some distance from the shores.

After sailing across a strip of clear water free from islands, between which we thread our way for three hours after leaving Stockholm, we come to Mariehamn, about halfway between the two shores. Then comes another little stretch of clear water, and then another great archipelago like the one on the Swedish shore, and between hundreds of little islands and great islands our steamer makes its way to its berth in the port of Åbo.

Very much like its neighboring shore on the opposite side is the approach to Åbo. Some of the islands are mere bare rocks, sticking their heads only a few feet above the surface of the sea, while others contain farms and forests and a considerable population. Many beautiful villas adorn some of these islands, and a rare place they afford for a holiday or a summer residence.

But the Finnish shore can boast islands enough to furnish one for every day of a decade, and before the next decade is over very likely some new ones will arise above the surface of the water, like the one which had almost come to the surface in 1907, but not near enough to be charted, or to prevent the wreckage of the Czar’s yacht upon it.

Sweden and Finland rest upon the same submerged plateau of solid rock, which adds another proof to my contention that, for all practical and descriptive purposes at least, Finland must still be considered a part of Scandinavia.

Though one crosses the Gulf of Bothnia in the night, he does not cross in the dark, for at this midsummer season there is no real darkness in this fairyland of midnight dawn. I was reminded very forcibly by contrast of the last time I crossed this bit of blue sea, for it was then a white sea. As far as the eye could reach, it could rest upon nothing but ice, solid fields of it, to the north and south, to the east and west.

Soon after we started it grew dark, for it was midwinter then. A blinding snowstorm came on; the road-way between the ice floes was a narrow one, and, that we might keep a straight course, a powerful searchlight rigged to the foremast was set blazing, and its blinding white light, far out over the expanse of ice and snow, showed the narrow line of blue through which we must steer. Sometimes we would pass a steamer with a searchlight of her own, dazzling us for a moment with her radiance, while we returned the compliment by throwing our searchlight into her eyes.

Men with lanterns and sledges came from the towns on the shore, far out from the land, to get the cargo meant for their port, and could come right up to the steamer’s side, for the ice made a continual wharf forty miles long to the sea.

When we struck the ice on the Finnish shore we found a different “proposition,” which the little Wellamo attacked right bravely, and for six hours or more we made good headway. When the ice was only three or four inches thick she would go through it as a cat would go through a pan of cream; when it was six or eight inches thick it was like plowing through soft butter; when it grew to be a foot thick it was like cutting our way through a stiff old cheese; and when the ice became two feet thick or more it was too much for the Wellamo, powerful as her engines were.

She would fall back and butt the ice again and again and again, but it was of no use. She would crunch it under her forefoot, and would almost rise on top of it, but it would always pile itself up in resistless masses in front of her.

Another ice-breaker came out from the Finnish shore to help us, but she proved of no avail, and was soon fast and tight in the ice two hundred yards from us. All day long the captain and crew worked to get us free. A dozen men with ice picks and axes hewed away at the frosty enemy that held us fast, but why the captain let them wear out their muscles in attempting the impossible I could not understand, for a tribe of Brownies might just as well attempt to level the Andes.

Families of seals came up through their breathing holes to look at us. They usually consisted of the old father and mother seal and one or two white, shaggy little babies, that looked like little polar bears. They were very tame and would let me go within twenty feet of them, when I left the steamer to pay them a visit. Then they would waddle off into the water. Sometimes a mother seal would poke her baby off the ice floe into the water out of harm’s way, which the little fellow apparently resented, for he would shake his shaggy head and scramble up on the ice again.

Surrounded by these interesting and novel scenes, we spent thirty hours ice-bound in the Baltic. Then the biggest ice-breaker of all, the Sampo, came to our rescue and landed us safely in Finland, after two nights and a day in the ice floe.

I was forcibly reminded of this memorable journey, because last night we sailed on the same stanch little steamer, the Wellamo, across smiling waters and between charming islands, with the sun to light our way for the most part instead of the electric lights, and when we reached the harbor there was that same benevolent old Sampo, the ice-breaker, that released us from our imprisonment, lying at the wharf. Her occupation is gone for the present, for, until next winter at least, she will not have to relieve any smaller steamers in distress, but can shove her ugly but useful nose in and out among the islands, whose people doubtless welcome her coming as we so gladly welcomed her on that January night which I have described.

The interesting sights and peoples whom I found on my arrival in Åbo I must describe in another letter.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

THIRTEENTH LETTER

Relates to Åbo, the ancient capital of Finland; tells of its famous castle and the picture of the scene once enacted there; its market place; its hospitable people; its fine old Cathedral; the tombs of the heroes of the Thirty Years’ War and of Queen Katherine, the peasant queen of Sweden.

Åbo, Finland, July 10.

My dear Judicia,

Finland has four important commercial ports—Åbo, HangÖ, Helsingfors, and Viborg. The two former are available in winter, for though not ice free, as the experience I related in the last chapter proves, the icebreakers can usually plow their way through and reach their berths in the course of time. Helsingfors and Viborg, however, are usually impossible in the winter time.

I was not sorry that my engagements led me first to Åbo, for historically it is the most interesting town in Finland. It is true that it is robbed of its ancient glory as the capital of the country and the seat of its great university, for both the capital and the university have been removed within the last hundred years to the more eligible site of Helsingfors. But Åbo has lost little time in crying over spilt milk or bewailing its ancient glories. Especially of late she has been making the most of her fine situation, as the city nearest to its neighbor, Sweden, and has greatly developed its commercial possibilities.

The port is a mile or more away from the heart of the city, with which it is connected by a line of electric cars. Almost the first thing that I saw on landing was a huge building covered with gray plaster. I found it difficult to decide whether it was a warehouse, a factory, or a prison. I was wrong in all my guesses, for it was Åbo’s famous castle, one of the great historic landmarks of Finland, and now converted into a museum, where one can study the costumes, the ancient armor, the furniture, and the articles of home life of this hardy, vigorous race.

The scene of one of the most interesting pictures that I ever saw is laid in this old castle. It is by Edelfelt, and now hangs in the national gallery at Helsingfors.

In a room of state in the old fortress lies an open coffin, in which is seen the face of a stern warrior with a long, flowing beard. Another soldier is standing by, with wrath upon his features, and, violating the sanctity of death, he pulls violently at the dead man’s beard. A lady of noble mien is standing near, resentment and haughty indignation depicted on her queenly face.

The great picture, perhaps the most famous and dramatic one ever painted by a Finnish artist, tells its own story, and when we know a little of Finnish history we can easily interpret it. The old man in the coffin is Klas Fleming, the commander of the castle; the soldier standing by and pulling the dead man’s beard is Duke Carl of Sweden, afterwards King Charles IX, who was striving to gain the throne and whom the Finns had vigorously opposed in favor of Sigismund their king. The duke could not capture the castle while the old commander was alive, but when he was killed it soon capitulated.

Angry at the long resistance, Duke Carl could only vent his wrath by showing an indignity to the dead. Turning to the commandant’s wife, who was standing by, he said, “If your husband were living his head would not be as safe as it is now.” But the countess, undaunted, replied, while her eyes flashed fire, “If he were living, your highness would not be here.”

There are two more very interesting centers in Åbo of which I must tell you. One is the market place, and the other the ancient cathedral. In the market place one can learn what people are to-day; in the cathedral one can learn from the monuments and the inscriptions something of what they were seven hundred years ago.

These open markets in the central square of most European cities are a great institution, and if Americans really want to reduce the cost of living, about which we all talk so much and so vehemently, they cannot do better than to establish such a country market in every considerable town throughout the Union.

To the market place in the center of Åbo come the farmers and their wives from all the surrounding country, some with large loads and some with little loads, but all ready to sell to any customer an infinitesimal quantity of their produce for an infinitesimal price. You can buy a single egg, or one carrot, or three or four potatoes, or a pat of butter that would not weigh an eighth of a pound, and you pay only what a single carrot is worth, or the price of an eighth of a pound of butter.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

Interior of a Finnish Cottage.

The lady of the house, even if she be a lady of high degree, does not consider it beneath her dignity to go to market herself, though she may often send her maid, or take her along to carry the market basket. In this sort of marketing you do not have to pay two or three middlemen’s profits, nor do you have to pay your grocer or butcher for the salary of several high-priced attendants and for an automobile, or a two-horse team to deliver the goods.

The most curious thing I saw in the Åbo market was the bread, which was being peddled by many an old woman from the back of her cart. The cheaper kinds are made of rye meal, and are as hard as the nether millstone. The loaves are flat and about the size of a dinner plate, with a large round hole in the middle. They would make admirable quoits, which you know is my favorite game, and if my Finnish friends would not have considered it altogether too frivolous I should have bought some of these loaves and inaugurated a quoit tournament on the spot.

In some places the bread is baked only once in six months, and the older the bread the harder to masticate.

Some edibles are “not as nahsty as they look,” as our English friends say of certain of our American dishes, but to the uninitiated this Finnish black bread is quite as nasty as it looks, for it is sour as well as hard, and in the back districts, when harvests are poor, chopped straw and bark are mixed with the meal.

I would not have you imagine, however, for a moment, that in the well-to-do families, or in the comfortable hotels and restaurants, we are reduced to such fare as this. In fact, I know of no country in the world, unless it be Sweden, where food is so abundant, so varied, and so deliciously cooked.

As I wandered in and out among the stalls of meat and vegetables and bread and cheese, woolen stockings and aprons, and butter and sausages, where one could find almost anything he might want to eat or drink or wear, I was most interested in the faces of these rugged, weather-beaten peasants.

Ernest Young has well described the character of the Finnish people when he says: “Nature, fate, and tradition have stamped a common mark on the Finnish type of character, which, indeed, varies considerably in the country, but is easily recognized by the foreigner. The general traits of character are hardened, patient, passive strength; resignation; perseverance, allied to a certain obstinacy; a slow, contemplative way of thinking; an unwillingness to become angry and a tendency, when anger has been aroused, to indulge in unmeasured wrath; coolness in deadly peril, but caution afterwards; … adherence to the old and well known; attention to duty; a law-abiding habit of mind; love of liberty, hospitality, honesty; a predilection for religious meditation, revealing itself in true piety, which, however, is apt to have too much respect for the mere letter.”

My own briefer acquaintance with the Finns has confirmed Mr. Young’s study of their traits of character, and I could imagine that even in the market place, as I walked back and forth, I could discover in the faces many of these admirable traits.

When one meets the upper, I will not say better classes, one is sure to be charmed with his Finnish friends. Their abundant hospitality, which always presses upon us two cups of coffee (delicious coffee at that) when you really only want one; their deferential courtesy, shown not only in words, but in a multitude of kind and thoughtful actions; their intelligence; their intimate knowledge of the great world outside their own boundaries; their pleasing vivacity (for in this respect they differ from the quiet stolidness of the less educated peasantry) all these qualities combine to make them the most charming of hosts and companions.

The cathedral of Åbo stands not far from the market place, across the little river that runs through the town, and on a sightly eminence of its own. It was begun in 1229, and was not finished until the year 1400. How patient these old builders were! They did not run up their jerry-built houses and churches in a month, but when they were built they stood for centuries.

This cathedral is of purely Gothic architecture, much like the cathedral in Upsala, and it dates from about the same period. It has not been renovated out of all resemblance to its original self, however, like the Upsala dome, and on that account is more interesting, in my opinion. The lofty brick walls are scarred by the storms of the centuries and eaten out here and there by the tooth of time, but the church is well preserved in spite of its nearly seven hundred years, and is filled, Sunday after Sunday, with a throng of honest worshipers.

The mural paintings about the altar, though of modern date, are well worth studying, one of them, especially, which represents the first baptism in Finland at a spot very near to Åbo by Bishop Henrik, an English missionary, who in 1157 undertook the perilous task of converting the heathen Finns. The good bishop died in Finland, and was buried in this old church, where his bones rested in peace until 1720, when the Russians, for some unexplained reason, dug them up and carried them off. No man in these days knows his sepulchre. In some of the side chapels are buried heroes of the Thirty Years’ War, famous generals—whose suits of armor, scarred and dented by the enemy’s bullets, still stand beside their tombs.

The most famous tomb of all in the old Dom Church is that of Queen Katherine of Sweden, wife of Eric XIV, the oldest son of Gustavus Vasa. Eric had a checkered career, both politically and matrimonially. He was finally deposed from the throne, but while he occupied it his hand had been refused by Queen Elizabeth, by Mary Queen of Scots, and by two German princesses. He seems to have been very cosmopolitan in his love affairs, wooing Protestant and Catholic, Anglo-Saxon and Teuton with equal avidity. At length, having apparently no luck in court circles, he turned to a beautiful girl among his own people, and married a peasant’s daughter named Karin (or Katherine) MÅnsdotter. The following is the story which one often hears in Finland:

“One day King Eric was strolling through the market place at Stockholm, when his attention was attracted by a singularly fair and graceful child, the daughter of a common soldier, who was selling nuts. He sent her to his palace to be educated, and when she was old enough he asked her to marry him. All kinds of objections were raised by his nobles and his relatives, and accusations of witchcraft were made against Karin, but the wild and passionate monarch took his way and married the little nut-seller. Then a brother prince, who felt deeply the disgrace that had been brought upon the royal order by this unseemly match, sent Eric a present of a handsome cloak in the back of which was sewed a patch of rough, homespun cloth. Eric accepted the gift, had the patch of homespun embroidered with gold and studded with jewels until it was the most brilliant and valuable part of the garment, and then returned it to the donor.”[5]

The peasant queen well repaid his love and devotion. She was buried in Åbo Cathedral, where her great black marble sarcophagus reminds every visitor of the little nut-seller who became a queen and who showed her queenly qualities in adversity and exile. A stained-glass window in the cathedral shows her dressed in white robes, with a crown upon her head, stepping down from her throne on the arm of a Finnish page.

The country round about Åbo is, for Finland, fertile and productive, and in this region is made much of the delicious butter that is sent to England, and often much farther afield, but which on its way through Denmark often gets labeled “Danish butter.”

It is interesting for those who butter their bread with the Finnish product to know that in the many steam creameries “the dairymaids in spotless white linen dresses and aprons receive, weigh, and sterilize the milk before it is made into butter, while all the churning, scalding, and butter-packing rooms are models of cleanliness.” It is always a wonder to me why countries that make such delicious butter seem to be so fond of margarine, for everywhere on the railway stations, in the tramcars and in the newspapers in Scandinavia one sees “Pellerin’s Margarine” advertised. But there are some questions which polite travelers must not be too inquisitive about, and this is one of them.

Butter would naturally lead us to cows (unless the suspicions excited by these advertisements turn us aside), and cows lead into the country, but I have not room in this letter to tell you of country life in Finland, a fascinating theme, which must be reserved for another letter.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

FOURTEENTH LETTER

Wherein something is told of the charming lakes of Finland and the canals that link them together; of the “Kalevala,” the great Finnish epic; of the Finnish farmhouse, without and within; of the inevitable bathhouse; of a melancholy Finnish wedding and the more cheerful Finnish funeral.

In Finnish Lakeland, July 10.

My dear Judicia,

If you will study for a moment your Universal Atlas you will see that “Lakeland” is a most appropriate name for Finland, for, if the land in your atlas is represented as white and the water as blue, you will find Finland more than a quarter blue. In the southern and most populous part of the peninsula there is more lake than land in many sections.

The country has been called, poetically, the “Land of a Thousand Lakes,” but this title has “the power of an understatement.” To call it the “Land of Ten Thousand Lakes” would still be below the truth. Why could not the geographers, while they were about it, have given this romantic country a more romantic name? “Finland” or Fen-land, as the word means, suggests bogs and swamps and impassable morasses. The name “Suomi,” by which the Finns designate their beloved country, is no better in its implications, for that, too, means “Swamp-land.”

However, since we cannot change the name we must take out of it all suggestions of miasmatic swamps and read into it suggestions of sparkling waters, cold and limpid; of birch-bordered lakes, studded with emerald islands; of quiet thoroughfares of water that lead from one lovely piece of water to another; a country where you can journey for three days through a constant succession of beautiful lakes without retracing your steps.

Man has assisted nature in making this waterway, and it is especially interesting to Americans to know that the great Saima Canal, which links together the longest stretch of lakes, was built by Nils Ericsson, the brother of the immortal engineer who built the Monitor, and who invented the screw which to-day drives every ship across the Atlantic.

None need ask for a more delightful trip than on these lake-linked canals, where one is continually passing from one lovely sheet of water to another, which now expand into a little wave-lashed sea, now narrow to the dimensions of a river. Again our boat twists around a granite headland, stern and precipitous; then skirts a tree-clad shore, or a meadow spangled with flowers of many colors, and again threads a narrow, tortuous passage for a mile or two, or is hoisted by a convenient lock to a higher level and another equally beautiful lake. The scenery is wilder but no less beautiful than in Swedish lakeland, which I have before described.

In Finnish Lakeland.

Though our vessel is driven by steam and not by wind, one can appreciate the lines of the ancient Finnish poet who wrote:

“Pleasant ’tis in boat on water,

Swaying as the boat glides onward,

Gliding o’er the sparkling water,

Driving o’er its shiny surface,

While the wind the boat is rocking,

And the waves drive on the vessel,

While the west-wind rocks it gently,

And the south-wind drives it onward.”

What poem do these lines remind you of, Judicia? I know that you will promptly respond Hiawatha. But the Finns would put it the other way about, and tell us that Hiawatha reminded them of the Kalevala, and they would be right, for Longfellow learned this meter from a German translation of Kalevala, a meter in which all varieties of Finnish verse are written. Kalevala means the “Land of Heroes,” and is a long poem describing every phase of Finnish life, animate and inanimate. It is a collection of the folk lore and ancient runes of the people, gathered together with infinite pains and put into modern rhyme and meter by Elias LÖnnrot, a poor country doctor, who spent all his life in an inland village but yet made the greatest of all contributions to Finnish literature. We must take the Kalevala along with us as we travel through Finnish lakeland.

This unknown old poet of the folk songs, who wrote before the recorded history of Finland began, serves as a pretty good botanical guide to the trees and shrubs along the banks of this great waterway when he tells us that Sampsa, the good and all-powerful genius of the older time, planted the trees which delight us in these later days.

“On the hills he sowed the pine-trees,

On the knolls he sowed the fir-trees,

And in sandy places heather;

Leafy saplings in the valley.

In the dales he sowed the birch-trees,

In the loose earth sowed the alders,

Where the ground was damp, the cherries,

Likewise in the marshes, sallows.

Rowan-trees in holy places,

Willows in the fenny regions,

Juniper in stony districts,

Oaks upon the banks of rivers.”

When we think of the way in which a noble birch tree is often stripped and scarified by the boys who covet its bark, and the deer that love its leaves, and the winter frosts that make its gaunt boughs shiver in the cold winds, what can be prettier than the “Birch Tree’s Lament,” as described in this ancient poem:

“Often unto me defenceless,

Oft to me unhappy creature,

In the short spring come the children,

Quickly to the spot they hurry,

And with sharpened knives they score me,

Draw my sap from out my body,

Strip from me my white bark-girdle,

Cups and plates therefrom constructing,

Baskets too for holding berries.”

…

“And the wind brought ills upon me,

And the frost brought bitter sorrows,

Tore the wind the green cloak from me,

Frost my pretty dress tore off me,

Thus am I of all the poorest,

And a most unhappy birch-tree,

Standing stripped of all my clothing,

As a naked trunk I stand here,

And in cold I shake and tremble,

And in frost I stand lamenting.”

In the course of our lake journey we pass countless farmhouses, all of which have common characteristics. Many are painted red and make vivid spots of color on the landscape, either in the midst of the green of summer or the white of winter. One large corner of the living room is devoted to a huge fireplace, in which great logs glow and cheerily crackle throughout the long, cold winter. On the rafters overhead dried vegetables are strung in festoons, or hoes, rakes, and fishing tackle adorn the ceiling.

The one piece of furniture of distinction and honor is the long sofa which graces one side of the room. What the throne is to the king’s palace, the sofa is to the peasant’s home. Says Paul Wainemann in his Summer Tour in Finland: “The right-hand corner of the sofa is the Holy of Holies and is always reserved for the governor’s wife, if she graces an assembly with her presence. Beside her would sit the wife of the official next highest in rank. An unmarried lady under no provocation would be tempted to seat herself on the sofa, it being considered the height of indecorum to do so, as well as being a sure and certain sign that she would remain a spinster to the end of her days. Needless to say, a mere man would be hounded out of the room if he even attempted to commit such an appalling breach of etiquette.”

I must say that in the last respect, though a mere man myself, my experience has been different from that of Mr. Wainemann, for I have frequently been urged and sometimes almost compelled by my Finnish hostesses to take the honored seat on the sofa, a seat which I could not refuse without an undue struggle to show humility and politeness.

An interesting and admirable addition to almost every Finnish home in the country is the bathhouse, which is usually built separate from the dwelling house. The Finns and the Japanese are the only two peoples whom I know who realize the virtue of a hot bath and almost daily indulge in it. The Englishman enjoys his cold tub, and carries his absurd bathtub with him, whether he is going to Timbuctoo or to the next town in his own country. The modern American can hardly exist in a house that does not contain one or more set bathtubs with hot and cold water, but the Finn and the Jap are the only peoples who believe in the hottest kind of a hot bath, though the Russians and Turks indulge in them occasionally.

In the country bathhouse unhewn pine logs often form the walls. A big, inclosed fireplace or stove of rough stones is built in the middle or on one side. When the stones are sizzling hot, an abundance of water is poured upon them, and in the steam, which seems almost scalding, the Finn lies down and enjoys the moist relaxation to his heart’s content. When he has enjoyed this sufficiently, he beats himself or his next neighbor with bunches of fragrant birch twigs, while his neighbor returns the favor. When he has been sufficiently soaped and rubbed and flogged with twigs, he jumps into the cold lake, if it be summertime, or rolls in the snow in winter. I have never seen it myself, but I am told on good authority that in the evening it is no uncommon sight in the country to see a row of naked men sitting outside the house, having just completed their cold plunge.

That this Finnish bath is an immemorial custom is shown by the fact that in one of the folk songs of the Kalevala, Anniki, the little sister of Ilmarinen, “the great primeval craftsman,” says to him:

“Now the bath-room’s filled with vapor,

And the vapor-bath I’ve heated,

And have steeped the bath-whisks nicely,

Choosing out the best among them.

Bathe, O Brother, at your pleasure,

Pouring water as you need it,

Wash your head to flaxen color,

Till your eyes shine out like snow-flakes.”

In these pleasant farmhouses by which we glide so rapidly in our little steamer how many human comedies and tragedies must have been enacted; how many joys and sorrows have found place beneath these roofs? Births and betrothals, weddings and funerals, each has brought as much ecstasy or grief as the same events bring to the noble chateau or lordly palace.

You remember, Judicia, how we have sometimes been amused at the profound melancholy which occasionally invests a wedding at home. Do you remember how we have seen the weeping mother of the bride or groom sobbing out her congratulations, and how sometimes the whole assembly was almost dissolved in tears.

Well, in the olden times the Finns carried the mournful wedding to the nth degree of melancholy. As late as 1899 a writer in a popular magazine, speaking of a Russian wedding just across the Finnish border, says: “Such a thing as a radiant bride is unknown in those regions, and the chief idea seems to be to make as great a show of grief as possible, and to make the function as dismal as a funeral.”

A weeping wedding is not now known in Finland except in the remotest districts, but I am told that not long ago a company of professional wedding weepers were brought to Helsingfors from the far north to show how they could enliven marriage festivities and to remind a modern bride of the customs of long ago.

The Kalevala, that thesaurus of rhythmical information concerning ancient customs, tells us what was said to the bride before she left for her new home, to make her thoroughly appreciate the old homstead, and also the way in which she replied to the jeremiad. I will quote for you a few more lines:

“Hast thou never, youthful maiden,

On both sides surveyed the question,

Looked beyond the present moment,

When the bargain was concluded?

All thy life must thou be weeping,

And for many years lamenting,

How thou left’st thy father’s household,

And thy native land abandoned,

From beside thy tender mother,

From the home of her who bore thee.”

And the lugubrious maiden replies,

In Eastern Finland.

A funeral could hardly by any possibility have been more solemn in the ancient times than a wedding. Indeed often it must have been a more joyous occasion, for I am told that in some sections, even to this day, after the relatives have kissed the corpse, all the guests present shake him by the hand, and that the friends usually speak of him not as dead, but as one “whom it hath pleased God to take.”

You can see what a delightful experience a voyage through lakeland must be, in the midst of such charming and ever-changing scenery, the human interest constantly kept alive, not only by the abundant life along the shore, but by the unforgotten customs of the past which the Kalevala has so beautifully preserved for us.

There are other and more thrilling voyages through the “Land of a Thousand Lakes” than the one I have taken you upon to-day. The trip, for instance, down the rapids of UleÅ, which is made every day of the tourist season in long, narrow rowboats, under the care of skillful licensed pilots. The canoe trip from Moosehead Lake in Maine to the St. John River in New Brunswick through the Allegash waters is not unlike this journey down the UleÅ River, though the passage of the many rapids is usually less thrilling. But in Finland, as in Maine, it takes a cool and skillful hand to pilot the frail craft down these ripping, roaring rapids. Now it looks as though the way was blocked up by a jutting headland; again it seems as if our craft would be dashed to pieces against a gigantic boulder in mid-stream, but always in the UleÅ, as in the Allegash, the turn of a paddle avoids the threatened danger, and our boat floats out into smooth waters to the peaceful thoroughfare below the rapids.

But it is hopeless to attempt to describe all the interesting matters that cluster around country life in Finland. Here is a country as big as all Great Britain, with the Low Countries across the Channel thrown in. Who would have the nerve to attempt to describe country life in Belgium, Holland, Ireland, Scotland, and England in one letter? The very magnitude of the task must be my excuse for the fragmentary incompleteness of my attempt.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

FIFTEENTH LETTER

Which has to do with Tammerfors, the “Manchester” of Finland, and the railway which takes one thither; its remarkable church; the Wounded Angel and the Garden of Death; also something about the church boats of the country districts, and the strange notice given from the pulpit.

Tammerfors, Finland, July 15.

My dear Judicia,

Tammerfors is an inland city on the edge of the great lake region of which I wrote you in my last letter. I had to come here by rail, and perhaps you will be interested to know something about the railways of Finland. I must confess that as means of communication they cannot rival the steamers on the lakes and canals, but, as in most other countries, they are a very necessary evil, and, since in Finland they run on well-ballasted roads for the most part and burn fragrant wood instead of ill-smelling coal, their nuisance as smoke and dust producers is reduced to a minimum.

They are practically all owned by the State, and as the State is in no hurry to get its inhabitants from one place to another, or to get them out of the country, should they be bound to emigrate, the average rate of speed is not more than fifteen miles an hour. Even the express trains between Helsingfors and St. Petersburg are no cannon balls or “Flying Yankees,” for a mile in three minutes and ten seconds is the best they attempt to do for the whole journey.

Still if you have time enough at your disposal you can travel a surprisingly long distance in Finland for a surprisingly small amount of money. The third-class fares (and the third class is patronized by the great majority of people) costs less than a cent a mile, and you can go clear around the east coast of the Gulf of Bothnia to its northern tip, if you are so disposed, and at Haparanda can almost shake hands with our Swedish friends, whom I visited in LuleÅ a few months ago.

I would not advise you to take a third-class car if you intend to take a long journey in Finland, for the hard, yellow, wooden seats get decidedly tiresome before you have jolted over a hundred miles of Finnish scenery. The second-class cars are entirely comfortable and even luxurious on the principal lines, and you can settle down happily in your plush, springy comfort, usually having a whole seat to yourself.

The first-class accommodations, as in Sweden, are only distinguished from the second by the placard on the door or the window and by your own inner consciousness that you have paid considerably more than your neighbors for the same accommodations. Most of the cars are more like our American cars than the ordinary European coaches, with an aisle down the middle and seats on either side, though the same car may be divided into two or three compartments with doors between.

The stations are modest, wooden buildings, and, except for the numerous signs of margarine, beer, and other comestibles with which they are decorated, I could readily mistake them for railway stations in northern New Hampshire or western Dakota.

One could never, however, mistake a Finnish railway restaurant for a similar institution in America. Here one sees no quick-lunch counter, no aged sandwiches made the day before yesterday, no greasy doughnuts or any impossible concoction misnamed “coffee.” Here everything is neat, nice, and orderly. The coffee is sure to be delicious, for in the meanest Finnish hut, even in far Lapland, the proprietor would be ashamed to give you anything but a steaming and fragrant cup of their national beverage. With the coffee, and for the same price, you get an unlimited supply of little cakes or sweetbread, while if you want a full dinner of three or four courses, superbly cooked and elegantly served, it will cost you only two and a half Finnish marks, or about fifty cents, for a Finnish mark differs from a German mark in being of the same value as a franc.

Outside the station, in rows along the platform, I often see old women with baskets of apples or plates of fried meat or cakes, or loaves of coarse bread and bottles of milk, just as we saw them in that long journey across Siberia in the early days of the Trans-Siberian Railway. You remember how eagerly we used to race for the bread and milk stalls to get our supply before the little tables were swept bare by the hungry travelers? In Finland one does not have to be a sprinter in order to get his share of the food, for there is always an abundant supply at the restaurants. The old women on the outside, because of the cheapness of their wares, are largely patronized by the poorer people.

The notices in the stations and in the cars about smoking, spitting, putting your head out of the window, standing on the platform, and so on, are printed in six languages: Finnish, Swedish, Russian, German, French, and English, and the maps and diagrams and time-tables are so full of helpful information that no wayfaring man need go astray.

In one respect the Finnish railways differ from the Swedish, though they are such near neighbors. The Swedish trains glide away like the Arab when he has folded his tents, without making any fuss about it. No bell is rung, no whistle blown, no word of command given. The station master simply waves his hand when the exact second for departure has come, and unless you keep your eyes wide open, and your watch exactly with railway time, you are likely to see the rear car of the train vanishing in the distance while you make frantic but unavailing attempts to catch it. In Finland, on the contrary, there is no danger of your being left, for first the station bell rings, then it rings again, then the conductor blows his whistle, then the engineer answers him with the locomotive whistle, and by that time, everything being good and ready, the train will slowly get under way.

Tammerfors might well be called “Grand Rapids,” a name indeed which is not far from its Finnish significance, for through the center of the city rushes a tremendous stream of water, over rapids that make it swirl and eddy and shoot its spray high in the air. This river Tam affords a splendid water power for the principal manufacturing city in Finland, and is lined with great cotton and woolen mills and paper factories, which rightly give the city the nickname, even among its own inhabitants, of the “Manchester” of Finland.

In size, however, the Finnish Manchester is nearer the New Hampshire than the English Manchester, and its river rushes and tumbles through the city much as the Merrimac throws itself with mighty force against the water wheels of the New England city.

But neither Manchester, New Hampshire, nor Manchester, England, can boast such a remarkable church as the “Manchester” of Finland. Indeed, I doubt if such a church can be found in any one of the five continents. It is a very expensive church, built of solid granite, with enormous pillars that would not be put to the blush by the ruins of Baalbec, or the ancient temple of Sardis. In this church a great Christian Endeavor meeting was held which completely filled the audience room, as has been the case in the other cathedral churches of Finland, and I must say that it was rather a unique experience as I spoke to the living audience to see also a painted audience of naked men and half-clothed women coming out of their graves forming the great altar piece, representing the Resurrection morning.

Around the huge gallery, supported by enormous stone pillars, is a row of naked boys carrying a large garland which completely surrounds the gallery. This garland is supposed to signify the “Burden of Life,” and is composed of roses and thorns. Some of the boys are carrying it lightly, and others are staggering under its weight.

In other parts of the church are two remarkable frescoes, one representing two boys carrying a wounded angel on a kind of litter between them. The angel’s drooping wings, spotted with blood, and her sweet, patient expression contrast strangely with the rugged little Finnish boys who are carrying her. One of them has a resentful expression on his face, as though he were deadly tired of his burden. Did the artist mean to tell us that every boy carries an angel with him, though he often resents her presence and would be glad to get rid of her?

The other mural painting represents the “Garden of Death,” and shows us three grinning skeletons with watering-pots in their hands, sprinkling flowers of various kinds as they wander through their garden. One writer calls this a “perfectly hideous piece of symbolism,” but it did not so strike me. Though unpleasant in some of its features, it is not nearly so hideous as the pictures of the Last Judgment depicted by many of the old masters, and it teaches the worth-while lesson that “life evermore is fed by death.”

This church is characteristic of the new and audacious architecture of Finland. Ernest Young well describes it when he says: “Without a mass of photographs it is difficult to convey to the reader any idea of the curious character of this modern work. One man calls it “hideous”; another “lovely.” The choice of the epithet probably depends on your education, your prejudices, and your ability to seek sympathetically for the meaning of the builder. It falls into no category of known style; hence if you be but of the schools it will probably appal you.”

“To me,” he continues, “it is an intense joy, even when it is ugliest and least effective, for it is daring. It is only a man of courage who dares to do the things that these men do. It is full of the spirit of youth, and though it be not Gothic, nor Moorish, nor anything but Finnish, I could wander all day amongst the houses and streets where it is prevalent, feeling as though I were once more in the presence of an age when men dared to be original in defiance of all accepted traditions.”

I ought to tell you, perhaps, before I get through with this remarkable church that there was strong opposition, especially on the part of the clergy, to the extreme nudity of the decorations, but the persistence of the artists, and the pride of the people in their original productions, prevailed over all objections, and the paintings remain there, naked and unashamed.

Tammerfors, or the Rapids of the Tam, affords a good point of departure for the more remote interior of Finland, and here we should find churches and churchgoers of a different type from those which the large cities afford. The churches, like the houses of the people, are of wood, and some of them are enormous buildings in which the peasants from many miles around gather to worship and to be instructed by their honored pastors. With some families, as with our Puritan ancestors, Sunday begins on Saturday afternoon. This is perhaps a matter of necessity rather than of conscience, because not a few live at such a distance that they have to start on Saturday afternoon in order to get to church in season for the Sunday service. No sight in Finland is more unique than the great “church boats” that leave the remote villages on Saturday evenings for a journey through the long summer twilight to the distant church. These boats sometimes contain twenty or thirty worshipers, and the rhythm of the splashing oars is accentuated by the sweet voices of the maidens as they sing the psalms and hymns of ancient Finland. Practically all the people are Lutherans, though there are Free Church Lutherans and State Church Lutherans, and you may be sure that Luther’s famous hymn, “A Mighty Stronghold is our God,” often resounds along the peaceful waterways and is echoed from the pine-clad hills as the “church boat” makes its way to the sanctuary. In these days the “church boat” is often a steamer of considerable size, which starts early Sunday morning and collects three or four hundred worshipers from the different hamlets and farms within its circuit.

If we should attend church in one of these remote districts in the winter we would very likely hear the minister give out a singular notice from the pulpit. It would not be concerning a “Ladies’ Sewing-circle,” or a “Men’s Club,” or a “Turkey Supper,” or a “Strawberry Festival,” but, strangest of all strange pulpit “intimations,” as our Scotch friends would call it, it would relate to a bear hunt.

To be more specific, the minister would announce that a certain farmer had found a “ring,” and that no one must trespass upon his “ring.” This would mean that a certain member of the church had been lucky enough to track a bear to its lair, and that, without disturbing him, he had drawn a wide circle around him in the snow. Henceforward that bear is his property, either to kill or to sell to some sportsman who wants the excitement of a bear hunt.

Bruin himself, it seems, is not very particular about his winter quarters. When he is ready for his winter’s nap he lies down and lets the snow cover him up as it will. It often makes a large heap over his improvised bedroom, and his breath, escaping like steam from a hole in the snow which it has melted, often reveals his hiding place to the sharp-eyed farmer, who is always on the lookout for it.

The discoverer rarely disturbs Bruin himself, but he sends word to the Tourist Association of Helsingfors that he has a “ring” for sale, and there are many keen hunters, some of whom come from Russia and some from England, who are glad to pay from seventy-five to eighty dollars for the ring. When the huntsman reaches the bear’s winter quarters, the dogs and the beaters rout out the bear, who usually puts up a very stiff fight, and not altogether a one-sided one before he is dispatched by the hunter.

I must say it seems to me something like burglary, if not highway robbery and murder, to drive inoffensive Bruin in the dead of his long winter night out of his cozy sleeping apartment. Especially I am sorry for the mother bear, who always keeps her cubs with her during the long night, while the father bear keeps a bedroom of his own. As a result of these bear hunts, it is said that “in Viborg and other towns it is not uncommon to see young bears which have been caught in this manner acting as playmates for the children, and running at large in the gardens and on the hills.”

I suppose that Aylmer told you all about skiing when he wrote you of his winter in Norway, and I will simply remind you, and Aylmer, too, if you will communicate the fact to him, that the “ski is a Finnish invention, and was known here many years before it was introduced into Norway.” So that fact counts at least one point for my side of Scandinavia.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

SIXTEENTH LETTER

Deals with Helsingfors, the capital of the Grand Duchy, and its strongly fortified islands; with Woman’s Suffrage in progressive Finland; with universal education; with the folk schools and the extreme attention given to them; with the university and its degrees; with the literature of the Finns and the more interesting Finn himself.

Helsingfors, Finland, July 20.

My dear Judicia,

Helsingfors is the best place in the world from which to write you my last letter about greater Scandinavia, for it is not only the capital and chief city of the Grand Duchy of Finland, but it is the best point of departure from the country for one whose pleasant tasks in these northern lands are nearly finished. From here I can go by rail to St. Petersburg, and thence to any other desirable spot on the earth’s surface; or I can sail to Riga, to Stockholm, to a number of places on the German coast, or to Hull in England, and, with only one change of steamer, can get back to our best-loved America.

But I cannot leave Scandinavia without telling you something of this interesting city, the center not only of the political life but of the educational, literary, and artistic life of Finland.

The Russians have taken pains to make Helsingfors’ strong, strategic position, impregnable from the military point of view. The entrance to the inner harbor is so narrow that only one ship at a time can pass between the frowning rocks, and the murderous guns of the forts are so mounted that they can be turned against the foe, whether he approach by land or sea.

A little way out from the inner harbor is a scattered group of frowning, rocky islands fortified with the latest type of death-dealing cannon. At the time of the Crimean War both France and England mustered their fleets to take one of these islands, but found it impossible. To-day it would be a still more difficult task.

If poverty makes strange bedfellows, international complications and affiances make still stranger chums. Here are the bitter enemies of sixty years ago hobnobbing together in these days of the Entente cordiale. Republican France, constitutional Britain, and autocratic, reactionary Russia, “as thick as thieves” (no opprobrious implication intended), and working together with all the wiles and all the might of diplomacy to offset and hold in check the Triple Alliance.

Speaking of politics and government, I would modestly recommend both the suffragettes and the anti-suffragettes of England to study the experience of Finland in regard to this burning subject. Here is the only European country that totally ignores the word “male” in its suffrage regulations. Every adult has a vote, and, as fifty-three per cent of the inhabitants are women, they hold the much-dreaded balance of power which is such a bugbear to the “antis” of Great Britain.

Fish Harbor, Helsingfors.

Here is a country that is theoretically ruled by women, and yet there has been no tremendous cataclysm of the forces of nature. The sun rises and sets in Finland just as it used to do. People buy and sell and get gain, fall in love, are married and given in marriage, die and are buried, just as in the olden days. Theoretically the women could tip every man out of his parliamentary seat and run the government to suit themselves, but, strange to say, there are only seventeen women in the Finnish Diet. Less than one tenth of all the members belong to the terrible window-smashing sex, and one writer says of these seventeen: “They are mostly of middle age, grave, and even portentously solemn. They are apparently proof against all temptations of vanity. They dress with Quakerish simplicity and are completely absorbed in their duties.”

Whether it is due to the influence of woman or not, Finland is an exceedingly orderly and well-governed country, and it would be ruled still better did not the medieval government at St. Petersburg veto various measures relating to education and morals which would be for the welfare of the country. For instance, as I told you before, the Diet wants a larger measure of the prohibition of intoxicants, which the Czar has forbidden. The Diet has voted for compulsory education, which the imperial Romanoff, “with and by the consent of his ministers,” has also disallowed.

Nevertheless, in spite of this handicap Finland is in many respects the most progressive and best educated nation in Europe. Let the woman suffragists get what comfort they can from these facts, and let the suffragettes remember that in getting “votes for women” in Finland not a single bomb was exploded, or a house burned to the ground, or a single window broken by a wild and whirling female.

Until very recently there have been four estates in the Diet of Finland: Nobles, Clergy, Burghers, and Peasants. In the last-named house Finland was entirely unique. I have never heard of another nation that had a “House of Peasants” to legislate for it, but it must be remembered that many of these so-called peasants are very substantial farmers, and that their power in a country like Finland is paramount, as it ought to be.

In 1906 the four estates were abolished, and now there is only one legislative chamber, where representatives of all the people meet together to legislate for the welfare of their beloved fatherland.

You may have thought that I was drawing a “long bow” when I said that Finland was the best educated nation in the world, but I am prepared to defend the proposition. I do not mean to say that classical or technical education for the few has been carried to so high a point as in Germany, though in this respect Finland is not lacking. But in the rudiments of a sound education she is unsurpassed. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that every man, woman, and child of school age in Finland knows the three “R’s”—“readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmetic”—and he can pursue his education as much further as his time and inclination allow.

Think of the black belts of illiteracy in our own southland, of the “Crackers” who have never tried to learn their letters, of the hordes of newcomers to our shores, who could never get in if the reading test were applied to them! I acknowledge that America has a far different educational problem to deal with than compact, homogeneous Finland, but it nevertheless remains true that from the standpoint of elementary education Finland stands at the head of the class in the school of the nations.

Most exemplary and commendable care is taken to provide for the physical as well as the intellectual health of the children. I have not visited many of these schools myself, and am indebted to Mr. Ernest Young for the following facts. In the folk schools, which correspond to our public primary and grammar schools, manual work and gymnastics are required, as rigidly as study hours and recitations.

The General Architectural Council of Finland draws the plans for the schoolhouses. These plans provide for such minute affairs as the decorations of the rooms. In rooms facing the north, which will receive little sunlight, especially in the long winter days, warm reds, yellows, and greens are the prevailing tints; in the warmer rooms that face the south colder tones are used. There are no square corners for the accumulation of dust. The boys and girls have separate dressing rooms, and the newer buildings are provided with shower baths. Overcoats are hung up in the cloakrooms or corridors, and there is not only a separate place for each class, but a little closet for each pupil. Each of these is provided with a peg, a shelf for caps and bags, a stand for the umbrella, and a pigeonhole for the indispensable goloshes. Accommodations for snowshoes, sledges, skis, and bicycles are also provided. Every folk school in the country must have a playground and enough free land connected with it to furnish a garden plot for the teacher and pupils. The government is so fatherly, not to say motherly, as to ordain that the girls’ desks shall be provided with a pincushion.

Coeducation has no terror for the Finns, and boys and girls are educated together from the primary school to the time of their graduation at the university. Parents who are afraid of the effects of “calf love” from coeducation may perhaps be reassured by a remark quoted from a Finnish schoolgirl: “We may fall in love when we are at school,” she said, “but never with a boy in the same school as ourselves. You see, we know them too well.” You may be permitted, Judicia, if you desire to do so, to doubt the sweeping generalization of this young lady.

Finland must be a perfect paradise in summertime for poor and sickly children. They are not left to the occasional ministrations of some benevolent individual or voluntary society for a glimpse of the country, but, if they need an out-of-door holiday, they are sent by the municipality of Helsingfors into the country for a week, or a month, or three months, as the case may be, to recover health and strength in the holiday camps. That there is nothing haphazard about this municipal benevolence is shown by the fact that a public medical officer sends these poor children into the country and weighs and measures them before each holiday to know how much they have profited by it.

The morals of the children are looked after as well as their physical and mental training. Children who wish to go to any place of public amusement must ask permission of the head master of the school, unless they have distinct permission from their parents, and in many schools, even where parents give permission, the head master must be informed of it before the pupil goes to any public show. Every encouragement is given to poor and ambitious children who desire to pursue their education through the university. Free food, free clothes, and school books are provided for those whose parents absolutely cannot furnish them.

Helsingfors is the center of educational Finland, for here is the great college called the Alexander University, in grateful remembrance of Finland’s first Russian Grand Duke, the well-beloved Alexander I. When graduation time comes, each faculty in the schools of theology, law, medicine, and philosophy confers separate degrees. When the degrees are conferred, a cannon booms from the parapet near by in honor of each graduate, and the band welcomes him to his new honors with stately music. Instead of the gorgeous hoods displaying as many colors as Joseph’s coat, with which our own degrees are conferred, the Masters of Arts in Finland receive a gold ring, and the Doctors a silk-covered hat.

A beautiful motto is set over the door of Studentshuset, or “Students’ House,” the common meeting place of the students of both sexes. This was built by subscriptions voluntarily given by people in all parts of the country, and the motto over the door is, “Given by the Fatherland to its Hope.” No motto could better tell the ardent love of Finland for the higher education of its youth.

But you ask me, Judicia, “What of Helsingfors itself?” the city from which I have dated my letter. Well, it does not differ greatly from other European cities, when you look upon it superficially, for in its present aspect it is distinctively modern. Like all large Finnish towns, it has been burned down more than once, and after its last great conflagration, less than a century ago, its architects seem to have copied for the most part the models set them by other cities, for that was before a distinctive type of Finnish architecture began to make its appearance. Many of the streets are broad and lined with handsome houses and business blocks and public buildings. The University and the Art Museum are substantial but not imposing buildings, while the inadequate Diet House, as I told you, would soon be replaced by another if only Czar Nicholas would give his imperial permission.

In the center of one of the principal squares is a splendid statue of Alexander II, which a grateful people often decorate with wreaths to this day, as they remember the man who gave them back their liberties. One would think that no Russian bureaucrat to-day, intent upon taking away the liberties of the people, could look on this statue without a glow of inward shame.

The great church which dominates Helsingfors is St. Nicholas, which stands on a sightly eminence near the center of the city, and is a fine specimen of the Greek style of architecture. Here the state functions are observed, and here during my stay a great Christian Endeavor meeting was held which gave me an opportunity to see as fine a congregation of men and women, young and old, as one could see in any land beneath the sun.

Though the St. Nicholas is the largest and most popular church in the city, there is another whose architecture is far more remarkable, for it is the latest Finnish word in church building. It has the most massive and stately granite tower that I have seen on any church in Europe. It, too, stands upon a hill, and half a dozen streets seem to converge to it, so that whenever you lift up your eyes from almost any quarter of the city there is this magnificent tower, solemn, imposing, majestic, a conception which only a Finnish architect would dare to execute. The tower quite dwarfs the rest of the church, and from some points of view it seems to be all tower.

The audience room is of no inconsiderable size, and is better adapted for singing than for speaking. A fine organ in three sections, one in the front of the church, one in the rear, and one in the tower, whose notes seem to drop down as from heaven, render the musical services of unusual interest. If you should hear “Suomi’s Song” in this unique church, with its solemn and intensely patriotic cadences and words, you would better understand the love of the Finns for their country.

I have not space to tell you much of the literature of Finland, nor could I were my space unlimited, for much of the best of it has not been translated into English. As one has said: “A mere glance at a Finnish grammar, with its sixteen cases for the nouns and its host of grammatical complexities, gives one a humorous notion that it might have been perfected for the purpose of preventing any other nation from knowing anything about the beauties that it enshrines.”

However, some of the works of the beloved author Runeberg have been translated under the title Ensign Stals Song. I have already quoted from the Kalevala, the great epic of Finland, so admirably translated by Mr. Kirby and published in the “Everyman Library.” Of this poem Max MÜller says: “It should have a place in the literature of the world, on the same shelf with the poems of Homer, the Niebelungen, and other great epics which the world will not willingly let die.”

After all, interesting as is the country, the architecture, the literature, and the social customs, the most interesting thing about Finland is the Finn himself. His sturdiness, his good sense, his progressive spirit, his willingness to try experiments, but always under the Ægis of the Goddess of Law and Order; his healthy conservatism, his wise radicalism, his love of liberty, his hatred of tyranny—all combine to make one of the most interesting individuals on the face of the earth. I am glad that so many Finns have come to America, and that more are coming. They add the best possible element to our body politic. They do not herd together in the purlieus of our great cities, but for the most part spread themselves out over the limitless farmlands of the west, though some of them find employment in our manufacturing cities. Driven away from their home land by hard conditions of life or by the tyranny of their oppressors, three hundred thousand of them have found homes in the United States. Intelligent, law-abiding, liberty-loving, there is no better American than the Finnish American.

I do not know, Judicia, whether my poor letters have made you feel the charm of these sturdy, wholesome, homelike nations of the far north, whose fascination lies not so much in their art as in the varied beauties of the natural scenery and in the character of the people themselves, but, as for me, I must confess that I have fallen completely under the spell of Greater Scandinavia.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.

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