Horre, Hotel Breifond, September 6, 1902.

To-day we have driven thirty miles from Odda, all of it up hill, except the last six miles. We started about nine o’clock with two horses, an easy carriage, and a driver whom I have had to resign to H’s more promising Danish, for he is elderly and very weak in the foreign tongue. From the first we began to climb. The driver in Norway always walks up the hills, and the male traveler also walks, while the female traveler is expected to walk, if she be able. The Norse ponies take their time, although at the end of the day they have traveled many miles and are seemingly little tired.

By the side of the smooth road rushed a river, the Aabo Elv, a mass of foam and spray which sometimes flew over us. A couple of miles farther on we came to a little dark-blue lake, the Sandven Vand, surrounded by lofty mountains, on the far side of which, almost jutting into it, pressed down the glacier of Buarbrae, descending from the snow-fields of the Folgefonden, a single expanse of ice and snow some forty miles long and ten to twenty wide, the greatest accumulation of snow and ice in western Norway. Over the precipices hemming in the vand dashed scores of cataracts and cascades, often leaping two and three thousand feet in sudden plunge. H says nobody can ever show her a waterfall again, nor talk about English Waters or Scottish Lochs.

Passing the lake, we continued to ascend, the road entering a deep and sombre gorge, which suddenly widened out into a sunlit vale, the air being filled with mists and rainbows. We were nearing the Lotefos and the Skarsfos, two of Norway’s most celebrated cataracts. Two rivers begin falling almost a mile apart, approaching as they fall, until they unite in a final leap of nearly fifteen hundred feet, a splendid spectacle, while right opposite to them tumbles the Espelandsfos, falling from similar heights. The spray and mist of the three commingle in a common cloud, and the highway passes through the eternal shower bath. As you look up you can see the entire mass of the waters from their first spring into space throughout their tumultuous, furious descent, until they eddy at your feet. Nature is so lavish here with her gigantic earth and water masses that one is perpetually awe-struck.

One incident has occurred today, which I presume I may take as a high compliment to my native tongue. One of two young Frenchmen, whose carriage has traveled near our own, while walking ahead of his vehicle, found the ponies disposed to walk him down. Twice this happened. Then he waxed wroth. He suspected the tow-headed Norse driver of not being really asleep, but of trying to even up the ancient national grudge against his own dear France. He flew into a Gallic passion. He stopped short. He halted the team. He awoke the driver. He shouted in broken English, “You drive me down! You drive me down! You vone scoundrel! I say vone damn to you, I say vone damn, I say vone damn!”—shaking his fist in the astonished face of the sleepy-head. After that the Norseman kept awake and the French gentleman walked safely in the middle of the road. He evidently felt that to swear in French would be quite lost upon the son of the Vikings. English alone would do the job.

We climbed for many miles a deep glen called the Seljestad Juvet; and dined long past the hour of noon at a wayside inn, the Seljestad Hotel. The hotel was kept by women. “Our men,” they said, “are gathering hay at the Saeter (mountain farm) far up on the mountain highlands. They are gone for a month, and will not return until the crop is all got in.” We paid our modest reckoning to a delicate, fair-haired, blue-eyed little woman, with quiet, graceful manners, well bred and courteous in bearing. She is the bookkeeper and business manager of the inn, “so long as the summer season lasts,” she said. And then she sails to England in one of her father’s ships, and there becomes a governess in an English family until another summer holiday shall come around. She had never been to America. “Some day,” her skipper sire had “promised to take her to New York,” when they would “run over for a day” to Minneapolis to see an aunt and cousins who were prospering, as do all Norwegians in America’s opportunity-affording air. And “Americans, she always liked to meet,” she said, “for unlike the English, they met you so frankly and did not condescend.” She showed H all through the neat and tidy kitchen, while a big black nanny goat stood in the doorway and watched them both.

All the afternoon we kept on climbing by the winding roadway, passing a black-watered, snow-fed tarn, the Gors Vand, and over the Gorssvingane pass above the snow line, where snow-fields stretched below us, around us, above us. From the summit of 3,392 feet above Odda and the sea, we had a superb view of all the vast Folgefond ice-field behind us, and before us two others, the Breifond and the Haukeli Fjeld, as vast, while 2,000 feet right down beneath us lay a deep blue lake, the Roldals Vand.

The road now wound ten kilometers (six and one-third miles) down into the deep valley by many successive loops, twelve of them, one-half a mile to the loop—a feat of fine engineering, for this is a military road. We came down on a full trot all the way, even as Ole Mon came down the Laera Dal, until we reined in at a picturesque inn at the vale of Horre, overlooking the valley of Roldal and its vand. Now we are in a cozy hostelry, the Hotel Breifond, with a room looking out over the exquisite deep-blue lake, encompassed by green mountains and snow-covered summits.

Our hotel is kept by two sweet-faced elderly women, serene and rosy-cheeked, dressed in black with immaculate white caps; one is the widow of a daring seaman who years ago went down with his ship in a winter gale. He was the captain and would not leave his post, though many of the crew deserted and were saved. The other is her spinster sister, whose betrothed lover likewise was lost at sea. In the summer time they here harbor many anglers, who come to fish the waters of the Roldals Vand and adjacent streams, which like most Norwegian lakes and rivers are rented out by the local provincial or district governments. The visitors who come here are chiefly English, the ladies tell us, and great is their distress and often violent their objurgation at the absence of any darkness when they may sleep. They cannot adjust themselves to the nightless days. They are inexpressibly shocked when they find themselves playing a game of golf or tennis at midnight, or forgetful of the flight of time in the excitement of a salmon chase, pausing to eat a midday snack at 2 a. m.

Our beds are the softest we have yet slept in, for both mattress and coverlet are of eider down. The two ladies have been delighted to talk with H in the native tongue, and have told her of their nephews and cousins who are getting rich owning fine wheat farms in the Red River of the North. “Come back to us in June,” they say. “Our wild flowers are then in bloom, and the hungry trout and salmon will then rise to any fly!” And H and I resolve that in June we surely will return.

I saw one or two small pale butterflies to-day, and one gray moth at the snow edge, where we crossed the divide; the only ones I yet have seen. The birds, in this northland, of course, are all new to me; the crows are gray, with black wings, heads and tails; a magpie with white shoulders and white on head, and long, blue-black tail, is very tame; while a bird I take to be a jay is numerous, with black body, white shoulders and wing tips, and tail feathers edged with white. I have seen some gray swallows which are now gathering in flocks preparatory to going south, and several sparrows much like our field sparrows; and sandpipers and upland plover, very small. The gray crows have a coarse croak like a raven, “Krakers” they are called. In England we saw and heard our only lark the day we drove from Ventnor to Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, but I heard no other song birds in England, only once, near Oxford, when I caught a note like our song sparrow’s, while crows and rooks swarmed everywhere from Southampton to Inverness. In Denmark there are many storks, and I there saw the nest of one, a gigantic mass of sticks and mud, built on the ridge of a barn, but I noticed few other birds, except the gulls and terns along the sea. At Vang, the other day, I saw, as I wrote you, the ptarmigan, and the capercailzie stuffed and mounted by a Norwegian living there; they are found on the mountains thereabouts; and a passenger, day before yesterday, on the Sogne-fjord-boat, had in his hand half a dozen ptarmigan, with their plumage already turning toward the winter’s white.