Helen Hunt Jackson

The hardest way to go to Norway is by way of the North Sea. It is two days' and two nights' sail from Hull to Bergen; and two days and two nights on the North Sea are nearly as bad as two days and two nights on the English Channel would be. But the hardest way is the best way, in this as in so many other things. No possible approach to Norway from the Continent can give one the sudden characteristic impression of Norway sea and shore which he gets as he sails up the Stavanger Fjord, and sees the town of Stavanger looking off from its hillside over the fleets of island and rock that lie moored in its harbor.

At first sight it seems as if there were no Norway coast at all, only an endless series of islands beyond islands, never stayed by any barrier of mainland; or as if the mainland itself must be being disintegrated from its very centre outwards, breaking up and crumbling into pieces. Surely, the waters, when they were commanded to stay from off the earth, yielded the command but a fragmentary obedience so far as this region was concerned.

The tradition of the creation of Norway seems a natural outgrowth of the place,—the only way, in fact, of accounting for the lay of the land. The legend declares that Norway was made last, and in this wise: On the seventh day, while God was resting from his labors, the devil, full of spite at seeing so fair a world, hurled into the ocean a gigantic rock,—a rock so large that it threatened to break the axis of the universe. But the Lord seized it, and fixed it firm in place, with its myriad jutting points just above the waters. Between these points he scattered all the earth he had left; nothing like enough to cover the rock, or to make a respectable continent,—only just enough to redeem spots here and there, and give man a foothold on it. The fact that forty per cent of the whole surface of Norway is over three thousand feet above the sea is certainly a corroboration of this legend.

This island fringe gives to the coast of Norway an indefinable charm,—the charm of endless maze, vista, expectation, and surprise; lure, also, suggestion, dim hint, and reticent revelation, like a character one cannot fathom, and behavior one can never reckon on. Though the ship sail in and out of the labyrinths never so safely and quickly, fancy is always busy at deep-sea soundings; bewildered by the myriad shapes, and half conscious of a sort of rhythm in their swift, perpetual change, as if they, and not the ship, were gliding. The vivid verdure on them in spots has more the expression of something momentarily donned and worn than of a growth. It seems accidental and decorative, flung on suddenly; then, again, soft, thick, inexhaustible, as if the islands might be the tops of drowned forests.

Stavanger is one of the most ancient towns in Norway. It looks as if it were one of the most ancient in the world; its very brightness, with its faded red houses, open windows, and rugged pavements, being like the color and smile one sees sometimes on a cheerful, wrinkled, old face. The houses are packed close together, going up-hill as hard as they can; roofs red tiled; gable ends red tiled also, which gives a droll eyebrow effect to the ends of the houses, and helps wonderfully to show off pretty faces just beneath them, looking out of windows. All the windows open in the middle, outwards, like shutters; and it would not be much risk to say that there is not a window-sill in all Stavanger without flowers. Certainly, we did not see one in a three hours' ramble. From an old watchtower, which stands on the top of the first sharp hill above the harbor, is a sweeping off-look, seaward and coastward, to north and south: long promontories, green and curving, with low red roofs here and there, shot up into relief by the sharp contrast of color; bays of blue water breaking in between; distant ranges of mountains glittering white; thousands of islands in sight at once. Stavanger's approach strikes Norway's key-note with a bold hand, and old Norway and new Norway meet in Stavanger's market-place. An old cathedral, the oldest but one in the country, looks down a little inner harbor, where lie sloops loaded with gay pottery of shapes and colors copied from the latest patterns out in Staffordshire. These are made by peasants many miles away, on the shores of the fjords: bowls, jars, flower-pots, jugs, and plates, brown, cream-colored, red, and white; painted with flowers, and decorated with Grecian and Etruscan patterns in simple lines. The sloop decks are piled high with them,—a gay show, and an odd enough freight to be at sea in a storm. The sailors' heads bob up and down among the pots and pans, and the salesman sits flat on the deck, lost from view, until a purchaser appears. Miraculously cheap this pottery is, as well as fantastic of shape and color; one could fit out his table off one of these crockery sloops, for next to nothing. Along the wharves were market-stands of all sorts: old women selling fuchsias, myrtles, carrots, and cabbages, and blueberries, all together; piles of wooden shoes, too,—clumsy things, hollowed out of a single chunk of wood, shaped like a Chinese junk keel, and coarsely daubed with black paint on the outside; no heel to hold them on, and but little toe. The racket made by shuffling along on pavements in them is amazing, and "down at the heel" becomes a phrase of new significance, after one has heard the thing done in Norway.

Just outside the market-place we came upon our first cariole; it was going by like the wind, drawn by a little Norwegian pony, which seemed part pincushion, part spaniel, part fat snowbird, and the rest pony, with a shoe-brush, bristles up, for a mane. Such good-will in his trot, and such a sense of honor and independence in the wriggle of his head, and such affectionateness all over him, no wonder the Norwegians love such a species of grown-up useful pet dogs. Hardy they are, and, if they choose, swift; obey voices better than whips, and would rather have bread than hay to eat, at any time of day. The cariole is a kind of compressed sulky, open, without springs; the narrow seat, narrow even for one person, set high up on elastic wooden shafts, which rest on the axle-tree at the back, and on a sort of saddle-piece in front. The horse is harnessed very far forward in the low thills, and has the direct weight on his shoulders. A queerer sight than such a vehicle as this, coming at a Norwegian pony's best rate towards you, with a pretty Norwegian girl driving, and standing up on the cross-piece behind her a handsome Norwegian officer, with his plumed head above hers, bent a little to the right or left, and very close, lovers of human nature in picturesque situations need not wish to see. Less picturesque, and no doubt less happy for the time being, but no less characteristic, was the first family we saw in Stavanger taking an airing; a square wooden box for a wagon,—nothing more than a vegetable bin on wheels. This held two large milk-cans, several bushels of cabbages, four children, and their mother. The father walked sturdily beside the wagon, his head bent down, like his pony's; serious eyes, a resolute mouth, and a certain look of unjoyous content marked him as a good specimen of the best sort of Norwegian peasant. The woman and the children wore the same look of unjoyous and unmirthful content; silent, serious, satisfied, they all sat still among the cabbages. So solemn a thing is it to be born in latitude north. Had those cabbages grown in the Campagna, the man would have been singing, the woman laughing, and the young ones rolling about in the cart like kittens.

From Stavanger to Bergen is a half-day's sail: in and out among islands, promontories, inlets, rocks; now wide sea on one hand, and rugged shore on the other; now a very archipelago of bits of land and stone flung about in chaotic confusion, on all sides. Many of the islands are nothing but low beds of granite, looking as if it were in flaky slices like mica, or else minutely roughened and stippled, as though cooled suddenly from a tremendous boil. Some of these islands have oases of green in them; tiny red farm-houses, sunk in hollows, with narrow settings of emerald around them; hand's-breadth patches of grain here and there, left behind as from some harvest, which the hungry sea is following after to glean. No language can describe the fantastic, elusive charm of this islet and rocklet universe: half sadness, half cheer, half lonely, half teeming, altogether brilliant and brimming with beauty; green land, gray rock, and blue water, surging, swaying, blending, parting, dancing together, in stately and contagious pleasure. On the north horizon rise grand snow-topped peaks; broad blue bays make up into the land walled by mountains; snow fjelds and glaciers glitter in the distance; and waterfalls, like silver threads, shine from afar on the misty clouds. At every new turn is a hamlet or house, looking as if it had just crept into shelter; one solitary boat moored at the base of its rock, often the only token of a link kept with the outer world.

The half-day's sail from Stavanger to Bergen is all like this, except that after one turns southward into the Bergen Fjord the mysterious islanded shores press closer, and the hill shores back of them rise higher, so that expectancy and wonder deepen moment by moment, till the moment of landing on Bergen's water rim. "Will there be carriages at the wharf?" we had asked of the terrible stewardess who had tyrannized over our ship for two days, like a French Revolution fishwoman. "Carriages!" she cried, with her arms akimbo. "The streets in Bergen are so steep carriages can't drive down them. The horses would tumble back on the carriage,"—a purely gratuitous fiction on her part, for what motive it is hard to conceive. But it much enhanced the interest with which we gazed at the rounding hills, slowly hemming us in closer and closer, and looking quite steep enough to justify the stewardess's assertion. By clocks, it was ten o'clock at night; by sky, about dawn, or just after sunset; by air, atmosphere, light, no time which any human being ever heard named or defined. There is nothing in any known calendar of daylight, twilight, or nightlight which is like this Norwegian interval between two lights. It is weird, bewildering, disconcerting. You don't know whether you are glad or sorry, pleased or scared; whether you really can see or not; whether you'd better begin another day's work at once, or make believe it is time to go to bed.

If somebody would invent a word which should bear the same interesting, specific, and intelligible relation to light and dark that "amphibious" does to land and water, it would be, in describing Norway twilight, of more use than all the rest of the English language put together. Perhaps the Norwegians have such a word. I think it highly probable they have, and I wish I knew it.

In this strange illuminated twilight, we landed on the silent Bergen wharf. The quay was in shadow of high warehouses. A few nonchalant and leisurely men and boys were ambling about; custom-house men, speaking the jargon of their race, went through the farce of appearing to ransack our luggage. Our party seemed instantaneously to have disintegrated, in the half darkness, into odds and ends of unassorted boxes and people, and it was with gratitude as for a succession of interpositions of a superior and invincible power that we finally found ourselves together again in one hotel, and decided that, on the whole, it was best to go to bed, in spite of the light, because, as it was already near midnight, it would very soon be still lighter, and there would be no going to bed at all.

The next day, we began Bergen by driving out of it (a good way always, to begin a place). No going out of Bergen eastward or westward except straight up skyward, so steep are the slopes. Southward the country opens by gentler ascents, and pretty country houses are built along the road for miles,—all of wood, and of light colors, with much fantastic carving about them; summer-houses perched on the terraces, among lime, birch, and ash trees. One which we saw was in octagon shape, and had the roof thick sodded with grass, which waved in the wind. The eight open spaces of the sides were draped with bright scarlet curtains, drawn away tight on each side, making a Gothic arch line of red at each opening. It looked like somebody's gay palanquin set down to wait.

Our driver's name was Nils. He matched it: short, sturdy, and good-natured; red cheeks and shining brown eyes. His ponies scrambled along splendidly, and stopped to rest whenever they felt like it,—not often, to be sure, but they had their own way whenever they did, and were allowed to stand still. Generally they put their heads down and started off of their own accord in a few seconds; occasionally Nils reminded them by a chuckle to go on.

There is no need of any society for the prevention of cruelty to animals in Norway. The Norwegian seems to be instinctively kind to all beasts of bondage. At the foot of steep hills is to be seen everywhere the sign, "Do not forget to rest the horses." The noise Nils made when he wished to stop his ponies gave us a fright, the first time we heard it. It is the drollest sound ever invented for such a use: a loud call of rolling r's; an ingenious human parody on a watchman's rattle; a cross between a bellow and a purr. It is universal in Norway, but one can never become accustomed to it unless he has heard it from infancy up.

The wild and wooded country through which we drove was like parts of the northern hill country of New England: steep, stony hills; nooks full of ferns; bits of meadow in sunlight and shadow, with clover, and buttercups, and bluebells, and great mossy bowlders; farm-houses snugged down in hollows to escape the wind; lovely dark tarns, with pond-lilies afloat, just too far from the shore for arms to reach them. Only when we met people, or when the great blue fjord gleamed through the trees below us, did we know we were away from home. It is a glory when an arm of the sea reaches up into the heart of a hill country, so that men may sail to and from mountain bases. No wonder that the Vikings went forth with the passion of conquering, and yet forever returned and returned, with the passion of loving their gamle Norge.

When we came back to the inn, we were invited into the landlady's own parlor, and there were served to us wine and milk and sweet tarts, in a gracious and simple hospitality. The landlady and her sister were beautiful old ladies, well past sixty, with skins like peaches, and bright eyes and quick smiles. High caps of white lace, trimmed with sky-blue ribbons, and blue ostrich feathers laid on them like wreaths above the forehead, gave to their expression a sort of infantile elegance which was bewitching in its unworldliness; small white shawls thrown over their shoulders, and reaching only just below the belt, like those worn by old Quaker women, corroborated the simplicity of the blue ribbons, and added to the charm. They had all the freshness and spotlessness of Quakers, with color and plumes added; a combination surely unique of its kind. One of these old ladies was as gay a chatterer as if she were only seventeen. She had not one tooth in her mouth; but her mouth was no more made ugly by the absence of teeth, as are most old women's mouths, than a baby's mouth is made ugly by the same lack. The lips were full and soft and red; her face was not wrinkled; and when she talked and laughed and nodded, the blue ostrich feathers bobbing above, she looked like some sort of miraculous baby, that had learned to talk before "teething."

Her niece, who was our only interpreter, and too shy to use quickly and fluently even the English she knew, was in despair at trying to translate her. "It is too much, too much," she said. "I cannot follow; I am too far behind," and she laughed as heartily as her aunt. The old lady was brimful of stories: she had known Bergen, in and out, for half a century, and forgotten nothing. It was a great pleasure to set her going, and get at her narrative by peeps, as one sees a landscape through chinks in a fence, when one is whirling by in a railway train. One of her best stories was of "the man who was brought back from the dead by coffee."

It seemed that when she was young there lived in Bergen three old women, past whose house an eccentric old bachelor used to walk every day at a certain hour. When he came back from his walk, he always stopped at their house and drank a cup of coffee. This he had done for a great many years. "He was their watch to tell the time by," and when he first passed the house they began to make the coffee, that it should be ready on his return. At last he fell ill and died, and two of these old women were hired to sit up one night and watch the corpse. It is the custom in Norway to keep all dead bodies one week before burial, if not in the house where they have died, then in the chapel at the graveyard. "When we do die on a Wednesday, we shall not be buried till another Wednesday have come," said the niece, explaining this custom.

These old women were sitting in the room with the corpse, talking and sipping hot coffee together, and saying how they should miss him; that never more would he go by their house and stop to get his coffee.

"At any rate, he shall taste the coffee once more," said one of them, and she put a spoonful of the hot coffee into the corpse's lips, at which the old gentleman stirred, drew a long breath, and began to lift himself up, upon which the women uttered such shrieks that the city watchman, passing by, broke quickly into the house, to see what was the matter. Entering the room, he found the watchers senseless on the floor, and the corpse sitting bolt upright in his coffin, looking around him, much bewildered. "And he did live many years after that time,—many, many years. My aunt did know him well," said the niece.

Other of her stories were of the sort common to the whole world,—stories of the love, sorrow, tragedy, mystery, which are inwoven in the very warp and woof of human life; the same on the bleak North Sea coast as on bright Southern shores. It seemed, however, a little more desolate to have lived in the sunless North seventy years of such life as had been dealt to one Bergen woman, who had but just passed away. Seventy years she had lived in Bergen, the last thirty alone, with one servant. In her youth she had been beautiful; and when she was still little more than a child had come to love very dearly the eldest son in a neighbor's house. Their parents were friends; the young people saw each other without restraint, familiarly, fondly, and a great love grew up between them. They were suffered to become betrothed, but for some unassigned reason their marriage was forbidden. For years they bore with strange patience their parents' apparently capricious decision. At last the blow fell. One of the fathers, lying at the point of death, revealed a terrible secret. This faithful betrothed man and woman were own brother and sister. The shame of two homes, the guilt of two unsuspected wrong-doers, was told; the mystery was cleared up, and more than one heart broken. Bitter as was the grief of the two betrothed, who could now never wed, there must have been grief still more terrible in the hearts of those long ago wedded, and so long deceived. The father died as soon as he had confessed the guilty secret. The young man left Norway, and died in some far country. The girl lived on,—lived to be seventy,—alone with her sorrow and disgrace.

Two other Bergen lovers had had better fate. Spite of fathers and mothers who had forbidden them to meet, it fell out for them to be safely married, one night, in the very teeth of the closest watching. The girl was permitted to go, under the escort of a faithful man-servant, to a wedding dance at a friend's house. The man-servant was ordered to stand guard at the door, till the dance was over; if the lover appeared, the girl was to be instantly taken home. Strange oversight, for parents so much in earnest as that, to forget that houses have more than one door! When the mirth was at its height, the girl stole away by the back door, and fled to her lover. At length the dance was over, and the guests were leaving; anxiously the faithful servitor, who had never once left the doorstep, looked for his young mistress. The last guest departed; his mistress did not appear. In great terror he entered; the house was searched in vain; no one knew when she had taken her leave. Trembling, he ran back to the father with the unwelcome news; and both going in hot haste to the lover's house, there they found the two young people sitting gay and happy over cake and wine, with the excellent clergyman who had that very hour made them man and wife.

The old lady had a firm and unalterable belief in ghosts, as indeed she had some little right to have, one was forced to admit, after hearing her stories. "And could you believe that after a man is dead he should be seen again as if he were alive?" said the niece. "My aunt is so sure, so sure she have seen such; also my aunt's sister, they did both did see him."

At one time the two sisters hired a house in Bergen, and lived together. In one of the upper halls stood a small trunk, which had been left there by a sailor, in payment of a debt he had owed to the owner of the house. One day, in broad daylight, there suddenly appeared, before the younger sister, the shape of a man in sailor's dress. He walked toward her, holding out a paper. She spoke to him wonderingly, asking what he wanted. At the sound of her voice he vanished into thin air. She fainted, and was for some weeks seriously ill. A few months later, the same figure appeared in the bedroom of the eldest sister (the old lady who told these stories). He came in the night, and approached her bed holding out a white paper in his hands. "My aunt say she could cut the shape in paper like the hat he wore on his head; she did see it so plain to-day as she have seen it then, and it shall be fifty years since he did come by her bed. She was so scared she would not have the trunk of the sailor to stand in the house longer; and after the trunk had gone away he did come no more to their house."

Another instance of this ghost-seeing was truly remarkable, and not so easily explained by any freak of imagination. Walking, one day, in a public garden, with a friend, she saw coming down the path toward them a singular old woman in a white nightcap and short white bedgown,—both very dirty. The old woman was tossing her arms in the air, and behaving so strangely that she thought she must be drunk, and turned laughingly to her friend, about to say, "What can be the matter with this old woman?" when, to her surprise, she saw her friend pale, fainting, ready to fall to the ground. She seized her in her arms, called for help, and carried her to a seat. On returning to consciousness, her friend exclaimed, "It was my mother! It was my mother!" The mother had been dead some months, had always worn in her illness this white cotton nightcap and short bedgown, and had been, it seemed, notoriously untidy.

"Now my aunt did never see that old woman in all her life," continued the niece. "So what think you it was, in that garden, that both them did see the same thing at one time? And my aunt's friend she get so very sick after that, she were sick in bed for a long time. My aunt will believe always she did see the mother's ghost; and she says she have seen a great many more that she never tells to anybody."

All this ghost-seeing has not sobered or saddened the old lady a whit, and she looks the last person in the world to whom sentimental or mischief-making spirits would be likely to address themselves: but there is certainly something uncanny, to say the least of it, in these experiences of hers.

One of the most novel pleasures in Bergen is old-silver hunting. There are shops where old silver is to be bought in abundance and at dear prices: old belts, rings, slides, buttons, brooches, spoons, of quaint and fantastic styles, some of them hundreds of years old. But the connoisseur in old-silver hunting will not confine his search for treasures to the large shops on the thoroughfares. He will roam the city, keeping a sharp eye for little boxes tucked up on walls of houses, far down narrow lanes and by-ways,—little boxes with glass sides, and a silver spoon or two, or an old buckle or brooch, shining through. This is the sign that somewhere in that house he will come on a family that has tucked away in some closet a little box of old silver that they will sell. Often they are workers in silver in a small way; have a counter in the front parlor, and a tiny work-room opening out behind, where they make thin silver spoons with twisted handles, and brooches with dangling disks and crosses, such as all the peasant women wear to-day, and a hundred years hence their grandchildren will be selling to English and American travellers as "old silver." The next century, however, will not gather such treasures as this one; there is no modern silver to compare with the ancient. It is marvellous to see what a wealth of silver the old Norwegians wore: buckles and belts which are heavy, buttons which weigh down any cloak, and rings under which nineteenth-century fingers, and even thumbs, would ache. And the farther back we go the weightier become the ornaments. In the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen are necklaces of solid gold, which it seems certain that noble Norwegian women wore in King Olaf's time,—necklaces in shape of a single snake, coiled, so heavy that they are not easily lifted in one hand; bracelets, also of the same snake shape, which a modern wrist could not wear half an hour without pain.

In these out-of-the-way houses where old silver is to be bought one sees often picturesque sights. Climbing up a narrow stairway, perhaps two, you find a door with the upper half glass, through which you look instantly into the bosom of the family,—children playing, old ladies knitting, women cooking; it seems the last place in the world to come shopping; but at the first glimpse of the foreign face and dress through the window, somebody springs to open the door. They know at once what it means. You want no interpreter to carry on your trade: the words "old silver" and "how much?" are all you need. They will not cheat you. As you enter the room, every member of the family who is sitting will rise and greet you. The youngest child will make its little bow or courtesy. The box of old silver will be brought out and emptied on a table, and you may examine its miscellany as long as you like. If an article pleases you, and you ask its price, it is taken into the work-room to be weighed; a few mysterious Norsk words come back from the weigher, and the price is fixed. If you hesitate at the sum, they will lower it if they can; if not, they will await your departure quietly, with a dignity of hospitable instinct that would deem it an offence to betray any impatience. I had once the good luck to find in one of these places a young peasant woman, who had come with her lover to bargain for the silver-and-gilt crown without which no virtuous Bergen bride will wed. These crowns are dear, costing often from fifty to a hundred dollars. Sometimes they are hired for the occasion; but well-to-do families have pride in possessing a crown which is handed down and worn by generation after generation. These lovers were evidently not of the rich class: they wore the plainest of clothes, and it was easy to see that the prices of the crowns disquieted them. I made signs to the girl to try one of them on. She laughed, blushed, and shook her head. I pressed my entreaties as well as I could, being dumb; but "Oh, do!" is intelligible in all languages, if it is enforced by gesture and appealing look. The old man who had the silver to sell also warmly seconded my request, lifted the crown himself, and set it on the girl's head. Turning redder and redder, she cried, "Ne, ne!" but did not resist; and once the crown was on her head she could not leave off looking at herself in the glass. It was a very pretty bit of human nature. The lover stole up close behind her, shy, but glowing with emotion, reached up, and just touched the crown timidly with one finger: so alike are men in love all the world over and all time through. The look that man's face wore has been seen by the eyes of every wife since the beginning of Eden, and it will last the world out. I slipped away, and left them standing before the glass, the whole family crowding around with a chorus of approving and flattering exclamations. Much I fear she could not afford to buy the crown, however. There was a hopeless regret in her pretty blue eyes. As I left the house I stepped on juniper twigs at the very next door; the sidewalk and the street were strewn thick with them, the symbol of death either in that home or among its friends. This is one of the most simple and touching of the Norwegian customs: how much finer in instinct and significance than the gloomy streamer of black crape used by the civilization calling itself superior!

The street was full of men and women going to and from the market-place: women with big wooden firkins strapped on their backs, and a firkin under each arm (these firkins were full of milk, and the women think nothing of bringing them in that way five or six miles); men with big sacks of vegetables strapped on in the same way, one above another, almost as high as their heads. One little girl, not nine years old, bore a huge basket of green moss, bigger than herself, lashed on her fragile shoulders. The better class brought their things in little two-wheeled carts, they themselves mounted up on top of sacks, firkins, and all; or, if the cart were too full, plodding along on foot by its side, just as bent as those who were carrying loads on their back. A Bergen peasant man or woman who stands upright is a rare thing to see. The long habit of carrying burdens on the back has given them a chronic stoop, which makes them all look far older than they are.

The sidewalks were lined with gay displays of fruit, flowers, and wooden utensils. Prettiest among these last were the bright wooden trunks and boxes which no Norwegian peasant will be without. The trunks are painted bright scarlet, with bands and stripes of gay colors; small boxes to be carried in the hand, called tines (pronounced teeners), are charming. They are oval, with a high perch at each end like a squirrel trap; are painted bright red, with wreaths of gay flowers on them, and mottoes such as "Not in every man's garden can such flowers grow," or, "A basket filled by love is light to carry." Bowls, wooden plates, and drinking-vessels, all of wood, are also painted in gay colors and designs, many of which seem to have come from Algiers.

Everybody who can sell anything, even the smallest thing, runs, or stands, or squats in the Bergen streets to sell it. Even spaces under high doorsteps are apparently rented for shops, rigged up with a sort of door, and old women sit crouching in them, selling blueberries and dark bread. One man, clad in sheepskin that looked a hundred years old, I saw trying to sell a bit of sheepskin nearly as old as that he was wearing; another had a basket with three bunches of wild monkshood, pink spirÆa, and blue larkspur, and one small saucer full of wild strawberries; boys carrying one pot with a plant growing in it, or a tub of sour milk, or a string of onions, or bunch of juniper boughs; women sitting on a small butter-tub upside down, their butter waiting sale around them in tubs or bits of newspaper, they knitting for dear life, or sewing patches on ragged garments; other groups of women sitting flat on the stones, surrounded by piles of juniper, moss, green heath, and wreaths made of kinni-kinnick vines, green moss, and yellow flowers. These last were for graves. The whole expression of the scene was of dogged and indomitable thriftiness, put to its last wits to turn a penny and squeeze out a living. Yet nobody appeared discontented; the women looked friendly, as I passed, and smiled as they saw me taking out my note-book to write them down.

The Bergen fish-market is something worth seeing. It isn't a market at all; or rather it is a hundred markets afloat and bobbing on water, a hundred or more little boats all crowded in together in an armlet of the sea breaking up between two quays. To see the best of it one must be there betimes in the morning, not later than seven. The quays will be lined with women, each woman carrying a tin coal-scuttle on her arm, to take home her fish in. From every direction women are coming running with tin scuttles swinging on their arms; in Bergen, fish is never carried in any other way. The narrow span of water between the quays is packed as close as it can be with little boats shooting among the sloops and jagts, all pushing up to the wharf. The steps leading down to the water are crowded with gesticulating women; screaming and gesticulating women hang over the railings above, beckoning to the fishermen, calling to them, reaching over and dealing them sharp whacks with their tin scuttles, if they do not reply. "Fisherman! I say, Fisherman! Do you hear me or not?" they shout. Then they point to one particular fish, and insist on having it handed up to them to examine; if it does not please them, they fling it down with a jerk, and ask for another. The boats were full of fish: silver-skinned herring, mackerel, salmon, eels, and a small fish like a perch, but of a gorgeous dark red color; others vermilion and white, or iridescent opal, blue, and black; many of them writhing in death, and changing color each second. Every few minutes a new boat would appear darting in, wriggling its way where it had seemed not one boat more could come; then a rush of the women to see what the new boat had brought, a fresh outburst of screams and gesticulations; then a lull and a sinking back to the noisy monotone of the previous chaffering. Some of the boats were rowed by women,—splendid creatures, in gay red bodices and white head-dresses, standing with one foot on the seat, and sculling their little craft in and out, dexterously shoving everybody to make way.

On the wharf were a few dealers with stands and baskets of fish; these were for the poorer people. "Fish that have died do be to be brought there," said my guide, with a shudder and an expressive grimace, "for very little money; it is the poor that take." Here were also great tubs of squirming eels, alive in every inch from tip to tip. "Too small to cook," said one woman, eying them contemptuously; and in a twinkling she thrust her arm into the squirming mass, grasped a dozen or more at once, lifted them out and flirted them into the seller's face, then letting them fall back with a splash into the tub, "H'm, pretty eels those are!" she said. "Put them back into the water with their mothers:" at which a great laugh went up, and the seller muttered something angrily which my guide would not translate for me.

On our way home I stopped to look at a group of peasant women in gay costumes. Two of them were from the Hardanger county, and wore the beautiful white head-dress peculiar to that region: a large triangular piece of fine crimped dimity pinned as closely as a Quaker cap around the face; the two corners then rolled under and carried back over a wooden frame projecting several inches on each side the head; the central point hanging down behind, over the shoulders,—by far the most picturesque of all the Norwegian head-dresses. A gentleman passing by, seeing my interest in these peasant dresses, spoke to the friend who was with me, whom he knew slightly, and said that if the American lady would like to examine one of those peasant costumes he had one which he would be happy to show to me.

The incident is worth mentioning as a fair illustration of the quick, ready, and cordial good-will of which Norwegians are full. Is there any other country in the world where a man would take that sort and amount of trouble for a chance traveller, of whom he knew nothing?

This Norwegian led us to his house, and opened two boxes in which were put away the clothes of his wife, who had been dead two years. This peasant costume which he showed to us she had had made to wear to the last ball she had attended. It was a beautiful costume; strictly national and characteristic, and made of exquisite materials. The belt was of silver-gilded links, with jewels set in them; the buttons for wrists and throat of the white blouse were of solid silver, with gold Maltese crosses hanging from them; the brooches and vest ornaments the same; the stomacher of velvet, embroidered thick with beads and gold; the long white apron with broad lace let in. All were rich and beautiful. It was strange to see the dead woman's adornments thus brought out for a stranger to admire; but it was done with such simplicity and kindliness that it was only touching, as no shadow of disrespect was in it. I felt instantly, like a friend, reverent toward the relics of the woman I had never seen.

One of our pleasantest Bergen days was a day that wound up with a sunset picnic on the banks of a stray bit of sea, which had gone so far on its narrow roadway east, among hill and meadow and rock, that it was like an inland lake; and the track by which its tides slipped back and forth looked at sunset like little more than a sunbeam, broader and brighter than the rest which were slanting across. We had come to it by several miles' driving to the north and east, over steep and stony hills, up which the road wound in loops, zigzagging back and forth, with superb views out seaward at every turn; at the top, another great sweep of view away from the sea, past a desolate lake and stony moor, to green hills and white mountains in the east. We seemed above everything except the snow-topped peaks. At our feet, to the west, lay the little sunny fjord; green meadows and trees and a handful of houses around it; daisies and clover and tangles of potentilla by the roadside; clumps of ragged robin also, which goes better named in Norway, being called "silken blossom;" mountain ash, larch, maple, and ash trees: bowlders of granite covered with mosses and lichens, bedded on every side,—it was as winning a spot as sun and sea and summer could make anywhere. On the edge of the fjord, lifted a little above it, as on a terrace, was a small white cottage, with a bit of garden, enclosed by white palings, running close to the water. Roses, southernwood, currants, lilacs, cherry-trees, potatoes, and primroses filled it full. We leaned over the paling and looked. An old woman, with knitting in her hand, came quickly out, and begged us to come in and take some flowers. No sooner had we entered the garden than a second old woman came hurrying with scissors to cut the flowers; and in a second more a third old woman with a basket to hold them. It was not easy to stay their hands. Then, nothing would do but we must go into the house and sit down, and see the brothers: two old men, one a clergyman, the other stone blind. "I can English read in my New Testament," said the clergyman, "but I cannot understand." "Yes, to be sure," said the blind brother, echoing him. And it was soon evident to us that it was not only sight of which the old man had been bereft; his wits were gone too; all that he could do now was to echo in gentle iteration every word that his brother or sisters said. "Yes, to be sure," was his instantaneous comment on every word spoken. "I think they are all just a little crazy. I am more happy now that we are away," said my friend, as we departed with our roses. "I do know I have heard that to be crazy is in that family." Crazy or not, they were a very happy family on that sunny terrace, and sane enough to have chosen the loveliest spot to live in within ten miles of Bergen.

Another of our memorable Bergen days was marked by a true Norwegian dinner in a simple Bergen home. "The carriage that shall take you will come at six," the hostess had said. Punctual to the hour it came; red-cheeked Nils and the cheery little ponies. On the threshold we were met by the host and hostess, both saying, "Welcome." As soon as we took our seats at table a toast was offered: "Welcome to the table" (Welkommen tilbords). The meal was, as we had requested, a simple Norwegian dinner. First, a soup, with balls made of chicken: the meat scraped fine while it is raw; then pounded to a paste with cream in a marble mortar, the cream added drop by drop, as oil is added to salad dressing; this, delicately seasoned, made into small round balls and cooked in the boiling soup, had a delicious flavor, and a consistency which baffled all our conjecture. Next came salmon, garnished with shreds of cucumber, and with clear melted butter for sauce. Next, chickens stuffed tight with green parsley, and boiled; with these were brought vegetables, raspberry jam, and stewed plums, all delicious. Next, a light omelet, baked in a low oval tin pan, in which it was brought to the table, the pan concealed in a frame of stiff white dimity with a broad frill embroidered in red. Cheese and many other dishes are served in this way in Norway, adorned with petticoats, or frills of embroidered white stuffs. With this omelet were eaten cherry sweetmeats, with which had been cooked all the kernels from the cracked stones, giving a rare flavor and richness to the syrup. After this, nuts, coffee, and cordials. When the dinner was over, the host and the hostess stood in the doorway, one on either hand; as we passed between them, they bowed to each one, saying, "God be with you." It is the custom of each guest to say, "Tak fur maden" ("Thanks for the meal"). After dinner our hostess played for us Norwegian airs, wild and tender, and at ten o'clock came Nils and the ponies to take us home.

The next day the jagts came in, a sight fine enough to stir one's blood; ten of them sailing into harbor in line, the same as they sailed in Olaf's day,—their prows curling upward, as if they stepped high on the waters from pride, and their single great square sail set on their one mast doggedly across their decks, as if they could compel winds' courses to suit them. They had been only four days running down from Heligoland, ahead of a fierce north wind, which had not so much as drawn breath even night or day, but blown them down flying. A rare piece of luck for the jagts to hit such a wind as that: when the wind faces them, they are sometimes four weeks on the way; for their one great stolid sail amidships, which is all very well with the wind behind it, is no kind of a sail to tack with, or to make headway on a quartering wind. The Vikings must have had a hard time of it, often, manoeuvring their stately craft in Mediterranean squalls, and in the Bay of Biscay. One of these jagts bore a fine scarlet silk flag with a yellow crown on it. It was called the king's jagt, because, a year ago, the king had visited it, spent some time on board, and afterward sent this flag as a gift to the captain. We hired an old boatman to row us alongside, and clambered on board up a swinging ladder; then up another ladder, still longer, to the top of the square mountain of salt codfish which filled three fourths of the deck. Most of it was to go to Spain, the skipper said,—to Spain and the Mediterranean. "It was well for Norway that there were so many Roman Catholic Countries:" no danger of an overstock of the fish market in Europe so long as good Catholics keep Lent every spring and Fridays all the year round. If the Catholics were to be converted, Norway would be plunged into misery. One tenth of her whole population live off, if not on, fish; the value of the fisheries is reckoned at over ten millions of dollars a year. Not a fish goes free on the Norway coast. Even the shark has to give up his liver for oil, from which item alone the Norwegians get about half a million of dollars yearly. The herring, shining, silvery, slippery fellows that they are, are the aristocrats of the Norway waters; the cod is stupid, stays quietly at home on his banks, breeds and multiplies, and waits to be caught year after year in the same places. But the herring shoals are off and on, at capricious pleasure, now here, now there, and to be watched for with unremitting vigilance. Kings' squadrons might come to Norway with less attention than is given to them. Flash, flash, flash, by electric telegraph from point to point all along the Norway shore, is sent like lightning the news of the arrival of their majesties the herring.

Our boatman rowed us across the harbor to the landing at the foot of the market-place. Climbing the steep hill, so steep that the roadway for vehicles zigzags five times across it between bottom and top, we looked back. Four more of the jagts were coming in,—colors flying, sails taut; six more were in sight, it was said, farther out in the fjord. The harbor was crowded with masts; the gay-colored houses and red roofs and gables of the city on the east side of the harbor stood out in relief against the gray, stony background of the high hill to which they cling. The jagts seem to change the atmosphere of the whole scene, and set it three centuries back. In the sunset light, they looked as fine and fierce as if they had just brought Sigurd home from Jerusalem.

Another memorable Bergen day was a day at Valestrand, on the island OsteroËn. Valestrand is a farm which has been in the possession of Ole Bull's family for several generations, and is still in the possession of Ole Bull's eldest son. It lies two hours' sail north from Bergen,—two hours, or four according to the number of lighters loaded with cotton bales, wood, etc., which the steamer picks up to draw. Steamers on Norway fjords are like country gentlemen who go into the city every day and come out at night, always doing unexpected errands for people along the road. No steamer captain going out from Bergen may say how many times he will stop on his journey, or at what hour he will reach its end: all of which is clear profit for the steamboat company, no doubt, but is worrying to travellers; especially to those who leave Bergen of a morning at seven, as we did, invited to breakfast at Valestrand at nine, and do not see OsteroËn's shore till near eleven. People who were not going to Valestrand to breakfast that day were eating breakfast on board, all around us: poor people eating cracknels and dry bread out of baskets; well-to-do people eating sausage, eggs, and coffee, neatly served at little tables on deck, and all prepared in a tiny coop below-stairs, hardly big enough for one person to turn around in. It is an enticing sight always for hungry people to see eating going on; up to a certain point it whets appetite, but beyond that it is both insult and injury.

The harbor of Valestrand is a tiny amphitheatre of shallow water. No big craft can get to the shore. As the steamer comes to a stop opposite it, the old home of Ole Bull is seen on a slope at the head of the harbor, looking brightly out over a bower of foliage to the southern sun. It appears to be close to the water, but, on landing, one discovers that he is still a half hour's walk away from it. A little pathway of mossy stones, past an old boat-house, on whose thatched roof flowering grasses and a young birch-tree were waving, leads up from the water to the one road on the island. Wild pansies, white clover, and dandelions, tinkling water among ferns and mosses, along the roadsides, made the way beautiful; low hills rose on either side, softly wooded with firs and birches feathery as plumes; in the meadows, peasant men and women making hay,—the women in red jackets and white blouses, a delight to the eye. Just in front of the house is a small, darkly shaded lake, in which there is a mysterious floating island, which moves up and down at pleasure, changing its moorings often.

The house is wooden, and painted of a pale flesh-color. The architecture is of the light and fantastic order of which so much is to be seen in Norway,—the instinctive reaction of the Norwegian against the sharp, angular, severe lines of his rock-made, rock-bound country; and it is vindicated by the fact that fantastic carvings, which would look trivial and impertinent on houses in countries where Nature herself had done more decorating, seem here pleasing and in place. Before the house were clumps of rose-bushes in blossom, and great circles of blazing yellow eschscholtzias. In honor of our arrival, every room had been decorated with flowers and ferns; and clumps of wild pansies in bloom had been set along the steps to the porch. Ole Bull's own chamber and music-room are superb rooms, finished in yellow pine, with rows of twisted and carved pillars, and carved cornices and beams and panels, all done by Norwegian workmen.

Valestrand was his home for many years, abandoned only when he found one still more beautiful on the island of Lysoen, sixteen miles southwest of Bergen.

A Norwegian supper of trout freshly caught, and smothered in cream, croquettes, salad, strawberries, goat's-milk cheese, with fine-flavored gooseberry wine, served by a Norwegian maid in a white-winged head-dress, scarlet jacket, and stomacher of gay beads, closed our day. As we walked back to the little moss-grown wharf, we found two peasants taking trout from the brook. Just where it dashed foaming under a little foot-bridge, a stake-lined box trap had been plunged deep in the water. As we were passing, the men lifted it out, dripping, ten superb trout dashing about wildly in it, in terror and pain; the scarlet spots on their sides shone like garnet crystals in the sun, as the men emptied them on the ground, and killed them, one by one, by knocking their heads against a stone with a sharp, quick stroke, which could not have been so cruel as it looked.

On our way back to Bergen we passed several little rowboats, creeping slowly along, loaded high with juniper boughs. They looked like little green islands broken loose from their places and drifting out to sea.

"For somebody's sorrow!" we said thoughtfully, as we watched them slowly fading from sight in the distance; but we did not dream that in so few days the green boughs would have been strewn for the burial of the beloved musician whose home we had just left.

The day of the burial of Ole Bull is a day that will never be forgotten in Bergen. From mothers to children and to children's children will go down the story of the day when from every house in Bergen Norway's flag floated at half-mast, because Ole Bull was dead, and the streets of Bergen for two miles—all the way from the quay to the cemetery—were strewn with green juniper boughs, for the passage of the procession bearing his body in sad triumph to the grave. It must have been a touching sight. Early in the morning a steamer had gone down to Lysoen to receive the body. This steamer on entering the Bergen Fjord was met by fifteen others, all draped in black, to act as its convoy. As the fleet approached the harbor, guns fired from the fort, and answered by the steamers, made peals of echoes rolling away gloriously among the hills. The harbor was crowded with shipping from all parts of the world; every vessel's flag was at half-mast. The quay was covered thick with green juniper, and festoons of green draped its whole front to the very water's edge. Every shop and place of business was shut; the whole population of the city stood waiting, silent, reverent, for the landing of the dead body of the artist who had loved Norway even as well as he loved the art to which his heart and life had been given. While the body was borne from the boat and placed in the high catafalque, a band played national airs of his arranging. Young girls dressed in black bore many of the trophies which had been given to him in foreign countries. His gold crown and orders were carried by distinguished gentlemen of Bergen. As the procession passed slowly along, flowers were showered on the coffin, and tears were seen on many faces, but the silence was unbroken.

At the grave, Norway's greatest orator and poet, BjÖrnstjerne BjÖrnson, spoke a few words of eloquent love and admiration. The grave was made on a commanding spot in the centre of Bergen's old cemetery, in which interments had been forbidden for many years. This spot, however, had been set apart more than thirty years ago, to be reserved for the interment of some great man. It had been refused to the father and framer of the Norwegian Constitution, Christie, whose statue stands in Bergen, but it was offered for Ole Bull; so much more tenderly does the world love artists than statesmen! The grave was lined with flowers and juniper, and juniper and flowers lay thick-strewn on the ground for a great space about. After the coffin had been put in the grave, and the relatives had gone away, there was paid a last tribute to Ole Bull,—a tribute more touching and of more worth than the king's letter, the gold crown, all the orders, and the flags of the world at half mast; meaning more love than the pine-strewn streets of the silent city and the tears on its people's faces,—a tribute from poor peasants, who had come in from the country far and near, men who knew Ole Bull's music by heart, who in their lonely, poverty-stricken huts had been proud of the man who had played their "Gamle Norge" before the kings of the earth. These men were there by hundreds, each bringing a green bough, or a fern, or a flower; they waited humbly till all others had left the grave, then crowded up, and threw in, each man, the only token he had been rich enough to bring. The grave was filled to the brim; and it is not irreverent to say that to Ole Bull, in heaven, there could come no gladder memory of earth than that the last honors paid him there were wild leaves and flowers of Norway, laid on his body by the loving hands of Norway peasants.

FOUR DAYS WITH SANNA.

A pair of eyes too blue for gray, too gray for blue; brown hair as dark as hair can be, being brown and not black; a face fine without beauty, gentle but firm; a look appealing, and yet full of a certain steadfastness, which one can see would be changed to fortitude at once if there were need; a voice soft, low, and of a rich fulness, in which even Norwegian sks flow melodiously and broken English becomes music,—this is a little, these are a few features, of the portrait of Sanna, all that can be told to any one not knowing Sanna herself. And to those who do know her it would not occur to speak of the eyes, or the hair, or the shy, brave look: to speak of her in description would be lost time and a half-way impertinence; she is simply "Sanna."

When she said she would go with me and show me two of the most beautiful fjords of her country, her beloved Norway, I found no words in which to convey my gladness. He who journeys in a foreign country whose language he does not know is in sorrier plight for the time being than one born a deaf-mute. Deprived all of a sudden of his two chief channels of communication with his fellows, cut off in an hour from all which he has been wont to gain through his ears and express by his tongue, there is no telling his abject sense of helplessness. The more he has been accustomed to free intercourse, exact replies, ready compliance, and full utterance among his own people, the worse off he feels himself now. It is ceaseless humiliation added to perpetual discomfort. And the more novel the country, and the greater his eagerness to understand all he sees, the greater is his misery: the very things which, if he were not this pitiful deaf-mute, would give him his best pleasures, are turned into his chief torments; even evident friendliness on the part of those he meets becomes as irritating a misery as the sound of waterfalls in the ears of Tantalus. Nowhere in the world can this misery of unwilling dumbness and deafness be greater, I think, than it is in Norway. The evident good-will and readiness to talk of the Norwegian people are as peculiarly their own as are their gay costumes and their flower-decked houses. Their desire to meet you half-way is so great that they talk on and on, in spite of the palpable fact that not one word of all they say conveys any idea to your mind; and at last, when your despair has become contagious, and they accept the situation as hopeless, they seize your hand in both of theirs, and pressing it warmly let it fall with a smile and a shake of the head, which speak volumes of regret both for their own loss and for yours.

It took much planning to contrive what we could best do in the four days which were all that we could have for our journey. The comings and goings of steamboats on the Norway fjords, their habits in the matter of arriving and departing, the possibilities and impossibilities of carioles, caleches, peasant carts and horses, the contingencies and uncertainties of beds at inns,—all these things, taken together, make any programme of journeying, in any direction in Norway, an aggregate of complications, risks, and hindrances enough to deter any but the most indomitable lovers of Nature and adventure. Long before it was decided which routes promised us most between a Saturday afternoon and the next Wednesday night, I had abandoned all effort to grapple understandingly with the problems, and left the planning entirely to my wiser and more resolute companion. Each suggestion that I made seemed to involve us in deeper perplexities. One steamer would set off at three in the morning; another would arrive at the same hour; a third would take us over the most beautiful parts of a fjord in the night; on a fourth route nothing in the way of vehicles could be procured, except the peasant's cart, a thing in which no human being not born a Norwegian peasant can drive for half a day without being shaken to a jelly; on a fifth we should have to wait three days for a return boat; on another it was unsafe to go without having received beforehand the promise of a bed, the accommodations for travellers being so scanty. The old puzzle of the fox and the goose and the corn is an a b c in comparison with the dilemma we were in. At last, when I thought I had finally arranged a scheme which would enable us to see two of the finest of the fjords within our prescribed time, a scheme which involved spending a day and a night in the little town of Gudvangen, in the valley of Nerodal, Sanna exclaimed, shuddering, "We cannot! we cannot! The mountains are over us. We can sleep at Gudvangen; but a whole day? No! You shall not like a whole day at Gudvangen. The mountains are so—" And she finished her sentence by another shudder and a gesture of cowering, which were more eloquent than words. So the day at Gudvangen was given up, and it was arranged that we were to wait one day at some other point on the road, wherever it might seem good, and upon no account come to Gudvangen for anything more than to take the steamer away from it.

The heat of a Bergen noon is like a passing smile on a stern face. It was cold at ten, and it will be cold again long before sunset; you have your winter wrap on your arm, and you dare not be separated from it, but the mid-day glares at and down on you, and makes the wrap seem not only intolerable but incongruous. As we drove to the steamer at twelve o'clock, with fur-trimmed wraps and heavy rugs filling the front seat of the carriage, and our faces flushed with heat, I said, "What an absurd amount of wraps for a midsummer journey! I have a mind to let Nils carry back this heavy rug."

"I think you shall be very glad if you have it," remarked Sanna. "Oh!" she exclaimed with a groan, "there is Bob."

Bob is Sanna's dog,—a small black spaniel, part setter, with a beautiful head and eye, and a devotion to his mistress which lovers might envy. Never, when in her presence, does he remove his eyes from her for many minutes. He either revolves restlessly about her like an alert scout, or lays himself down with a sentry-like expression at her feet.

"Oh, what is to do with Bob?" she continued, gazing helplessly at me. The rascal was bounding along the road, curvetting, and wagging his tail, and looking up at us with an audacious leer on his handsome face. "He did understand perfectly that he should not come," said Sanna; hearing which, Bob hung back, behind the carriage.

"Nils must carry him back," I said. Then, relenting, seeing the look of distress on Sanna's face, I added, "Could we not take him with us?"

"Oh, no, it must be impossible," she replied. "It is for the lambs. He does drive them and frighten them. He must stay, but we shall have trouble."

Fast the little Norwegian ponies clattered down to the wharf. No Bob. As we went on board he was nowhere to be seen. Anxiously Sanna searched for him, to give him into Nils's charge. He was not to be found. The boat began to move. Still no Bob. We settled ourselves comfortably; already the burdensome rug was welcome. "I really think Bob must have missed us in the crowd," I said.

"I do not know, I do not think," replied Sanna, her face full of perplexity. "Oh!" with a cry of dismay. "He is here!"

There he was! Abject, nearly dragging his body on the deck like a snake, his tail between his legs, fawning, cringing, his eyes fixed on Sanna, he crawled to her feet. Only his eyes told that he felt any emotion except remorse; they betrayed him; their expression was the drollest I ever saw on a dumb creature's face. It was absurd; it was impossible, incredible, if one had not seen it; as plainly as if words had been spoken, it avowed the whole plot, the distinct exultation in its success. "Here I am," it said, "and I know very well that now the steamer has begun to move you are compelled to take me with you. My heart is nearly broken with terror and grief at the thought of your displeasure, but all the same I can hardly contain myself for delight at having outwitted you so completely." All this while he was wriggling closer and closer to her feet, watching her eye, as a child watches its mother's, for the first show of relenting. Of course we began to laugh. At the first beginning of a smile in Sanna's eyes, he let his tail out from between his legs, and began to flap it on the deck; as the smile broadened, he gradually rose to his feet; and by the time we had fairly burst into uncontrolled laughter, he was erect, gambolling around us like a kid, and joining in the chorus of our merriment by a series of short, sharp yelps of delight, which, being interpreted, would doubtless have been something like, "Ha, ha! Beat 'em, and they 're not going to thrash me, and I'm booked for the whole journey now, spite of fate! Ha, ha!" Then he stretched himself at our feet, laid his nose out flat on the deck, and went to sleep as composedly as if he had been on the hearth-rug at home; far more composedly than he would had he dreamed of the experiences in store for him.

"Poor Bob!" said Sanna. "It must be that we shall send him back by the steamer." Poor Bob, indeed! Long before we reached our first landing, Bob was evidently sea-sick. The beautiful water of the great Hardanger Fjord was as smooth as an inland lake; changing from dark and translucent green in the narrowing channels, where the bold shores came so near together that we could count the trees, to brilliant and sparkling blue in the wider opens. But little cared Bob for the beauty of the water; little did it comfort him that the boat glided as gently as is possible for a boat to move. He had never been on a boat before, and did not know it was smooth. Piteously he roamed about, from place to place, looking off; then he would come and stand before Sanna, quivering in every fibre, and looking up at her with sorrowful appeal in his eyes. His thoughts were plainly written in his countenance now, as before; but nobody could have had the heart to laugh at him. Poor fellow! He was not the first creature that has been bowed down by the curse of a granted prayer.

Presently there came a new trouble. All along the Hardanger Fjord are little hamlets and villages and clusters of houses, tucked in in nooks among rocks and on rims of shore at the base of the high, stony walls of mountains, and snugged away at the heads of inlets. Many of these are places of summer resort for the Bergen people, who go out of town into the country in summer, I fancy, somewhat as the San Francisco people do, not to find coolness, but to find warmth; for the air in these sheltered nooks and inlets of the fjords is far softer than it is in Bergen, which has the strong sea wind blowing in its teeth all the while. On Saturdays the steamers for the Hardanger country are crowded with Bergen men going out to spend the Sunday with their families or friends who are rusticating at these little villages. At many of these spots there is no landing except by small boats; and it was one of the pleasantest features of the sail, the frequent pausing of the steamer off some such nook, and the putting out of the rowboats to fetch or to carry passengers. They would row alongside, half a dozen at a time, bobbing like corks, and the agile Norwegians would skip in and out of and across them as deftly as if they were stepping on firm floor. The Norwegian peasant is as much at home in a boat as a snail in his shell,—women as well as men; they row, stand, leap, gesticulate, lift burdens, with only a rocking plank between their feet and fathomless water, and never seem to know that they are not on solid ground. In fact, they are far more graceful afloat than on ground: on the land they shuffle and walk in a bent and toil-worn attitude, the result of perpetual carrying of loads on their backs; but they bend to their oars with ease and freedom, and wheel and turn and shoot and back their little skiffs with a dexterity which leaves no room for doubt that they can do anything they choose on water. It would not have astonished me, any day, to see a Norwegian coming towards me in two boats at once, one foot in each boat, walking on the water in them, as a man walks on snow in snow-shoes. I never did see it, but I am sure they could do it.

When these boats came alongside, Bob peered wistfully over the railings, but did not offer to stir. The connection between this new variety of water craft and terra firma he did not comprehend. But at the first landing which we reached, he gazed for a moment intently, and then bounded forward like a shot, across the gangway, in among the crowd on the wharf, in a twinkling.

"Oh!" shrieked Sanna, "Bob is on shore!" And she rushed after him, and brought him back, crestfallen. But he had learned the trick of it; and after that, his knack at disappearing some minutes before we came to a wharf—thereby luring us into a temporary forgetfulness of him—and then, when we went to seek him, making himself invisible among the people going on shore, was something so uncanny that my respect for him fast deepened into an awe which made an odd undercurrent of anxiety, mingling with my enjoyment of the beauties of the fjord. It was strange, while looking at grand tiers of hills rising one behind the other, with precipitous fronts, the nearer ones wooded, the farther ones bare and stony, sometimes almost solid rock, walling the beautiful green and blue water as if it had been a way hewn for it to pass; shining waterfalls pouring down from the highest summits, straight as a beam of light, into the fjord, sometimes in full torrents dazzling bright, sometimes in single threads as if of ravelled cloud, sometimes in a broken line of round disks of glittering white on the dark green, the course of the water in the intervals between being marked only by a deeper green and a sunken line in the foliage,—it was strange, side by side with the wonder at all this beauty, to be wondering to one's self also what Bob would do next. But so it was hour by hour, all of our way up the Hardanger Fjord, till we came, in the early twilight at half-past ten o'clock, to Eide, our journey's end. The sun had set—if in a Norway summer it can ever be truly said to set—two hours before, and in its slow sinking had turned the mountains, first pink, then red, then to an opaline tint, blending both pink and red with silver gray and white; all shifting and changing so fast that the mountains themselves seemed to be quivering beneath. Then, of a sudden, they lost color and turned gray and dark blue. Belts and downstretching lines of snow shone out sternly on their darkened summits; a shadowy half-moon rose above them in the southeast, and the strange luminous night lit up the little hamlet of Eide, almost light like day, as we landed.

At first sight Eide looked as if the houses, as well as the people, had just run down to the shore to meet the boat: from the front windows of the houses one might easily look into the cabin windows of the boat,—so narrow strips of shore do the mountain walls leave sometimes along these fjords, and such marvellous depth of water do the fjords bring to the mountains' feet.

"Have you written for rooms? Where are you going? There isn't a bed in Eide," were the first words that greeted us from some English people who had left Bergen days before, and whom we never expected to see again. The disappearing, reappearing, and turning up of one's travelling acquaintances in Norway is one of the distinctive experiences of the country. The chief routes of tourist travel are so involved with each other, and so planned for exchange, interchange, and succession of goers and comers, that the perpetual rencontres of chance acquaintances are amusing. It is like a performance of the figures of a country-dance on a colossal scale, so many miles to a figure; and if one sits down quietly at any one of the large inns for a week, the great body of Norway tourists for that week will be pretty sure to pass under his inspection.

At Holt's, in Bergen, one sees, say forty travellers, at breakfast, any morning. Before supper at eight in the evening these forty have gone their ways, and a second forty have arrived, and so on; and wherever he goes during the following week he will meet detachments of these same bands: each man sure that he has just done the one thing best worth doing, and done it in the best way; each eloquent in praise or dispraise of the inns, the roads, and the people, and ready with his "Oh, but you must be sure to see" this, that, or the other.

There were those who sat up all night in Eide, that night, for want of a bed; but Bob and we were well lodged in a pretty bedroom, with two windows white-curtained and two beds white-ruffled to the floor, on which were spread rugs of black-and-white goatskins edged with coarse home-made blue flannel. In the parlor and the dining-room of the little inn, carved book-cases and pipe-cases hung on the walls; ivies trained everywhere; white curtains, a piano, black-worsted-covered high-backed chairs, spotless table linen, and old silver gave an air of old-fashioned refinement to the rooms, which was a surprise.

The landlady wore the peasant's costume of the Hardanger country: the straight black skirt to the ankles, long white apron, sleeveless scarlet jacket, with a gay beaded stomacher over a full white blouse, shining silver ornaments at throat and wrists, and on her head the elegant and dignified head-dress of fine crimped white lawn, which makes the Hardanger wives by far the most picturesque women to be seen in all Norway.

At seven in the morning a young peasant girl opened our bedroom door cautiously to ask if we would have coffee in bed. Bob flew at her with a fierce yelp, which made her retreat hastily, and call for protection. Being sharply reproved by Sanna, Bob stood doggedly defiant in the middle of the floor, turning his reproachful eyes from her to the stranger, and back again, plainly saying, "Ungrateful one! How should I know she was not an enemy? That is the way enemies approach." The girl wore the peasant maiden's dress: a short black skirt bound with scarlet braid, sewed to a short sleeveless green jacket, which was little wider than a pair of suspenders between the shoulders behind. Her full, long-sleeved white blouse came up high in the throat, and was fastened there by two silver buttons with Maltese crosses hanging from them by curiously twisted chains. Her yellow hair was braided in two thick braids, and wound tight round her head like a wreath. She had a fair skin, tender, honest blue eyes, and a face serious enough for a Madonna. But she laughed when she brought us the eggs for our breakfast, kept warm in many folds of linen napkin held down by a great motherly hen of gray china with a red crest on its head.

The house was a small white cottage; at the front door a square porch, large enough to hold two tables and seats for a dozen people; opposite this a vine-wreathed arch and gate led into a garden, at the foot of which ran a noisy little river. An old bent peasant woman was always going back and forth between the house and the river, carrying water in two pails hung from a yoke on her shoulders. A bit of half-mowed meadow joined the garden. It had been mowed at intervals, a little piece at a time, so that the surface was a patchwork of different shades of green. The hay was hung out to dry on short lines of fence here and there. Grass is always dried in this way in Norway, and can hang on the fences for two weeks and not be hurt, even if it is repeatedly wet by rain. One narrow, straggling street led off up the hillside, and suddenly disappeared as if the mountains had swallowed it. The houses were thatched, with layers of birch bark put under the boards; sods of earth on top; and flowers blooming on them as in a garden. One roof was a bed of wild pansies, and another of a tiny pink flower as fine as a grass; and young shoots of birch waved on them both. The little river which ran past the inn garden had come down from the mountains through terraced meadows, which were about half and half meadow and terrace; stony and swampy, and full of hillocks and hollows. New England has acres of fields like them; only here there were big blue harebells and pink heath, added to clover and buttercups, wild parsley and yarrow. On tiny pebbly bits of island here and there in the brook grew purple thistles, "snow flake," and bushes of birch and ash.

Bob rollicked in the lush grass, as we picked our way among the moist hollows of this flowery meadow. In Sanna's hand dangled a bit of rope, which he eyed suspiciously. She had brought it with her to tie him up, when the hour should come for him to be carried on board the steamer. He could not have known this, for he had never been tied up in his life. But new dangers had roused new wariness in his acute mind: he had distinctly heard the word "steamer" several times that morning, and understood it. I said to him immediately after breakfast, "Bob, you have to go home by the steamer this morning." He instantly crept under the sofa, his tail between his legs, and cowered and crouched in the farthest corner; no persuasions could lure him out, and his eyes were piteous beyond description. Not until we had walked some distance from the house, in a direction opposite to the steamer wharf, did he follow us. Then he came bounding, relieved for the time being from anxiety. At last Sanna, in a feint of play, tied the rope around his neck. His bewilderment and terror were tragic. Setting all four feet firmly on the ground, he refused to stir, except as he was dragged by main force. It was plain that he would be choked to death before he would obey. The rope project must be abandoned. Perhaps he could be lured on board, following Sanna. Vain hope! Long before we reached the wharf, the engine of the boat gave a shrill whistle. At the first sound of it Bob darted away like the wind, up the road, past the hotel, out of sight in a minute. We followed him a few rods, and then gave it up. Again he had outwitted us. We walked to the steamer, posted a letter, sat down, and waited. The steamer blew five successive signals, and then glided away from the wharf. In less than three minutes, before she was many rods off, lo, Bob! back again, prancing around us with glee, evidently keeping his eye on the retreating steamboat, and chuckling to himself at his escape.

"O Bob, Bob!" groaned Sanna. "What is to do with you?"

We were to set off for Vossevangen by carriage at three; at half-past two poor Bob was carried, struggling, into the wood-shed, and tied up. His cries were piteous, almost more than we could bear. I am sure he understood the whole plot; but the worst was to come. By somebody's carelessness, the wood-shed door was opened just as we were driving away from the porch. With one convulsive leap and cry, Bob tore his rope from the log to which it was tied, and darted out. The stable boys caught him, and held him fast; his cries were human. Sanna buried her face in her hands and exclaimed, "Oh, say to the driver that he go so fast as he can!" And we drove away, leaving the poor, faithful, loving creature behind, to be sent by express back to Bergen on the steamer the next day. It was like leaving a little child alone among strangers, heart-broken and terrified. When we returned to Bergen we learned that he had touched neither food nor drink till he reached home, late the next night.

To go from Eide to Vossevangen, one must begin by climbing up out of Eide. It is at the bottom of a well, walled by green hills and snow-topped mountains; at the top of the well the country spreads out for a little, only to meet higher hills, higher mountains. Here lies a great lake, rimmed by broad borders of reeds, which shook and glistened in the wind and sun like the spears of half-drowned armies as we passed. Clumps and groves of ash-trees on the shores of this lake looked like huge clumsy torches set in the ground: their tops had been cut down again and again, till they had grown as broad as they were high. The leaves are used for the feed of sheep, and the boughs for firewood; and as in the frugal Norwegian living nothing that can be utilized is left to lie idle, never an ash-tree has the chance to shoot up, become tall and full of leaf. Magpies flitted in and out among them.

"One is for sorrow, and two are for joy, three must be a marriage, and four do bring good fortune, we do say in Norway," said Sanna. "But I think we shall have all sorrow and joy, and to be married many times over, if it be true," she added, as the noisy, showy creatures continued to cross our road by twos and threes.

High up on the hills, just in the edge of snow patches, sÆters were to be seen, their brown roofs looking as much a part of the lonely Nature as did the waterfalls and the pine-trees. On all sides shone the water,—trickling fosses down precipices, outbursting fosses from ravines and dells; just before us rose a wall some three thousand feet high, over which leaped a foaming cataract.

"We shall go there," said Sanna, pointing up to it. Sure enough, we did. By loops so oval and narrow they seemed twisted as if to thread their way, as eyes of needles are threaded, the road wound and doubled, and doubled and wound, six times crossing the hill front in fifteen hundred feet. At each double, the valley sank below us; the lake sank; the hills which walled the lake sank; the road was only a broad rift among piled bowlders. In many places these bowlders were higher than our heads; but there was no sense of danger, for the road was a perfect road, smooth as a macadamized turnpike. Along its outer edge rows of thickly set rocks, several feet high, and so near each other that no carriage could possibly fall between; in the most dangerous places stout iron bars were set from rock to rock; these loops of chain ladder up the precipice were as safe as a summer pathway in a green meadow. On a stone bridge of three arches we crossed the waterfall: basins of rocks above us, filled with spray; basins and shelves and ledges of rocks below us, filled with spray; the bridge black and slippery wet, and the air thick with spray, like a snow-storm; precipices of water on the right and the left. It was next to being an eagle on wing in a storm to cross that bridge in upper air. At the sixth turn we came out abreast of the top of the waterfall, and in a moment more had left all the stress and storm and tumult of waters behind us, and glided into a sombre, still roadway beside a calm little river deep in a fir forest. Only the linnÆa had won bloom out of this darkness; its courageous little tendrils wreathed the tree trunks nestled among the savage rocks, and held up myriads of pink cups wet with the ceaseless spray. It was a dreary, lonely place; miles of gaunt swamp, forest, and stony moor; here and there a farm-house, silent as if deserted.

"Where are all the people? Why do we not see any one moving about the houses?" I asked.

"In the house, reading, every one," replied Sanna. "On a Sunday afternoon, if there is no service in church, all Norwegian farm people do go into their houses, and spend all afternoon in reading and in religion."

At last we reached a more open country,—an off look to the west; new ranges of snow-topped mountains came in sight. We began to descend; another silent river slipping down by our side; two more dark, shining lakes. On the shore of one, a peasant man—the first living creature we had seen for ten miles—was taking his cart out of a little shed by the roadside. This shed was the only sign of human habitation to be seen in the region. His horse stood near by, with a big barrel slung on each side: they were barrels of milk, which had just been brought down in this way from a sÆter which we could see, well up in the cloud region, far above the woods on the left. Down the steep path from this sÆter the man had walked, and the horse bearing the barrels of milk had followed. Now the barrels were to be put in the cart, and carried to Eide. Ten miles more that milk was to be carried before it reached its market; and yet, at the little inn in Eide, for a breakfast, at which one may drink all the milk he desires, he will be asked to pay only thirty-five cents. What else beside milk? Fresh salmon, trout, two kinds of rye bread and two of white, good butter, six kinds of cheese, herrings done in oil and laurel leaves in tiny wooden barrels, cold sausage, ham, smoked salmon (raw), coffee and tea, and perhaps—wild strawberries: this will be the Eide summer-morning breakfast. The cheese feature in the Norwegian breakfast is startling at first: all colors, sizes, shapes, and smells known of cheese; it must be owned they are not savory for breakfast, but the Norwegian eats them almost as a rite. He has a proverb in regard to cheese as we have of fruit: "Gold in the morning, silver at noon, and lead at night;" and he lives up to it more implicitly than we do to ours.

As we neared Vossevangen, the silent river grew noisier and noisier, and at last let out all its reserves in a great torrent which leaped down into the valley with a roar. This torrent also was bridged at its leap; and the bridge seemed to be in a perpetual quiver from the shock of it. The sides of the rocky gorge below glistened black like ebony; they had been worn into columnar grooves by the centuries of whirling waters; the knotted roots of a fir forest jutted out above them, and long spikes of a beautiful white flower hung out from their crevices in masses of waving snowy bloom. It looked like a variety of the house-leek, but no human hand could reach it to make sure.

Vossevangen is a little farming hamlet on the west shore of a beautiful lake. The region is one of the best agricultural districts in western Norway; the "Vos" farmers are held to be fortunate and well to do, and their butter and cheese always bring high prices in market.

On the eastern shore of the lake is a chain of mountains, from two to four thousand feet high; to the south, west, and north rise the green hills on which the farms lie; above these, again, rise other hills, higher and more distant, where in the edges of the snow tracts or buried in fir forests are the sÆters, the farmers' summer homes.

As we drove into the village we met the peasants going home from church: the women in short green or black gowns, with gay jackets and white handkerchiefs made into a flying-buttress sort of head-dress on their heads; the men with knee-breeches, short vests, and jackets thick trimmed with silver buttons. Every man bowed and every woman courtesied as we passed. To pass any human being on the highway without a sign or token of greeting would be considered in Norway the height of ill manners; any child seen to do it would be sharply reproved. Probably few things would astonish the rural Norwegian more than to be told that among the highly civilized it is considered a mark of good breeding, if you chance to meet a fellow-man on the highway, to go by him with no more recognition of his presence than you would give to a tree or a stone wall.

It is an odd thing that a man should be keeping the Vossevangen Hotel to-day who served in America's civil war, was for two years in one of the New York regiments, and saw a good deal of active service. He was called back to Norway by the death of his father, which made it necessary for him to take charge of the family estate in Vossevangen. He has married a Vossevangen woman, and is likely to end his days there; but he hankers for Chicago, and always will. He keeps a fairly good little hotel, on the shores of the lake, with a row of willow-trees in front; dwarf apple-trees, gooseberry and currant bushes, and thickets of rhubarb in his front yard; roses, too, besides larkspur and phlox; but the rhubarb has the place of honor. The dining-room and the parlor were, like those at Eide, adorned with ivies and flowering plants; oleanders in the windows and potted carnations on the table. In one corner of the dining-room was a large round table covered with old silver for sale: tankards, chains, belts, buttons, coins, rings, buckles, brooches, ornaments of all kinds,—hundreds of dollars' worth of things. There they lay, day and night, open to all who came; and they had done this, the landlady said, for years, and not a single article had ever been stolen: from which it is plain that not only is the Norwegian honest himself, there must be a contagion in his honesty, which spreads it to all travellers in his country.

The next morning, early, we set off in a peasant's cart to visit some of the farm-houses.

"Now you shall see," said Sanna, "that it was not possible if you had all day to ride in this kind of wagon."

It did not take long to prove the truth of her remark. A shallow wooden box set on two heavy wheels; a wooden seat raised on two slanting wooden braces, so high that one's feet but just reach the front edge of the box; no dasher, no sides to seat, no anything, apparently, after you are up, except your hard wooden seat and two pounding wheels below,—this is the peasant wagon. The horse, low down between two heavy thills, is without traces, pulls by a breast collar, is guided by rope reins, and keeps his heels half the time under the front edge of the box. The driver stands up in the box behind you, and the rope reins are in your hair, or on your neck, shoulders, ears, as may be. The walloping motion of this kind of box, drawn by a frisky Norwegian horse over rough roads, is droll beyond description. But when it comes to going down hills in it, and down hills so steep that the box appears to be on the point of dumping you between the horse's ears at each wallop, it ceases to be droll, and becomes horrible. Our driver was a splendid specimen of a man,—six feet tall, strong built, and ruddy. When he found that I was an American, he glowed all over, and began to talk rapidly to Sanna. He had six brothers in America.

"They do say that they all have it very good there," interpreted Sanna; "and he thinks to go there himself so soon as there is money to take all. It must be that America is the best country in the world, to have it so good there that every man can have it good."

The roads up the hills were little more than paths. Often for many rods there was no trace of wheels on the stony ledges; again the track disappeared in a bit of soft meadow. As we climbed, the valley below us rounded and hollowed, and the lake grew smaller and smaller to the eye; the surrounding hills opened up, showing countless valleys winding here and there among them. It was a surpassingly beautiful view. Vast tracts of firs, inky black in the distances, emphasized the glittering of the snow fields above them and the sunny green of the nearer foregrounds below.

The first farm which we visited lay about three miles north of the village,—three miles north and up. The buildings were huddled together, some half dozen of them, in a haphazard sort of way, with no attempt at order, no front, no back, and no particular reason for approaching one way rather than another. Walls of hewn logs, black with age; roofs either thatched, or covered with huge slabs of slate, laid on irregularly and moss-grown; rough stones or logs for doorsteps; so little difference between the buildings that one was at a loss to know which were meant for dwellings and which for barns,—a more unsightly spot could hardly be imagined. But the owners had as quick an instinct of hospitality as if they dwelt in a palace. No sooner did Sanna mention that I was from America, and wished to see some of the Norwegian farm-houses, than their faces brightened with welcome and good-will, and they were ready to throw open every room and show me all their simple stores.

"There is not a man in all Vos," they said, "who has not a relative in America." And they asked eager question after question, in insatiable curiosity, about the unknown country whither their friends had gone.

The wives and daughters of the family were all away, up at the sÆter with the cows; only the men and the servant maids were left at home to make the hay. Would I not go up to the sÆter? The mistress would be distressed that an American lady had visited the farm in her absence. I could easily go to the sÆter in a day. It was only five hours on horseback, and about a half-hour's walk, at the last, over a path too rough even for riding. Very warmly the men urged Sanna to induce me to make the trip. They themselves would leave the haying and go with me, if I would only go; and I must never think I had seen Norwegian farming unless I had seen the sÆter also, they said.

The maids were at dinner in the kitchen. It was a large room, with walls not more than eight feet high, black with smoke; and in the centre a square stone trough, above which was built a funnel chimney. In this hollow trough a fire smouldered, and above it hung an enormous black caldron, full of beer, which was being brewed. One of the maids sprang from her dinner, lifted a trap door in the floor, disappeared in the cellar, and presently returned, bringing a curious wooden drinking-vessel shaped like a great bowl, with a prow at each side for handles, and painted in gay colors. This was brimming full of new beer, just brewed. Sanna whispered to me that it would be bad manners if we did not drink freely of it. It was passed in turn to each member of the party. The driver, eying me sharply as I forced down a few mouthfuls of the nauseous drink, said something to Sanna.

"He asks if American ladies do not like beer," said Sanna. "He is mortified that you do not drink. It will be best that we drink all we can. It is all what they have. Only I do hope that they give us not brandy."

There was no window in the kitchen, no ventilation except through the chimney and the door. A bare wooden table, wooden chairs, a few shelves, where were ranged some iron utensils, were all the furniture of the gloomy room. The maids' dinner consisted of a huge plate of fladbrÖd and jugs of milk; nothing else. They would live on that, Sanna said, for weeks, and work in the hay-fields from sunrise till midnight.

Opposite the kitchen was the living-room,—the same smoky log walls, bare floors, wooden chairs and benches. The expression of poverty was dismal.

"I thought you said these people were well to do!" I exclaimed.

"So they are," replied Sanna. "They are very well off; they do not know that it is not comfort to be like this. They shall have money in banks, these people. All the farmers in Vos are rich."

Above the living-room were two bedrooms and clothes-rooms. Here, in gay painted scarlet boxes and hanging from lines, were the clothes of the family and the bed linen of the house. Mistress and maid alike must keep their clothes in this common room. The trunks were ranged around the sides of the room, each locked with a key big enough to lock prison doors. On one side of one of the rooms were three bunk beds built in under the eaves. These were filled with loose straw, and had only blankets for covers. Into this straw the Norwegian burrows by night, rolled in his blankets. The beds can never be moved, for they are built in with the framework of the house. No wonder that the Norwegian flea has, by generations of such good lodging and food, become a triumphant Bedouin marauder, in comparison with whom the fleas of all other countries are too petty to deserve mention.

The good-natured farmer opened his mother's box as well as his wife's, and with awkward and unaccustomed hands shook out their Sunday costumes for us to see. From another box, filled with soft blankets and linen, he took out a bottle of brandy, and pouring some into a little silver bowl, with the same prow-shaped handles as the wooden one we had seen in the kitchen, pressed us to drink. One drop of it was like liquid fire. He seemed hurt that we refused more, and poured it down his own throat at a gulp, without change of a muscle. Then he hid the brandy bottle again under the blankets, and the little silver cup in the till of his mother's chest, and locked them both up with the huge keys.

Downstairs we found an aged couple, who had come from another of the buildings, hearing of our presence. These were the grandparents. The old woman was eighty-four, and was knitting briskly without glasses. She took us into the storerooms, where were bins of flour and grain; hams of beef and pork hanging up; wooden utensils of all sorts, curiously carved and stained wooden spoons, among other things,—a cask full of them, put away to be used "when they had a merry-making." Here also were stacks of fladbrÖd. This is the staple of the Norwegian's living; it is a coarse bread made of dark flour, in cakes as thin as a wafer and as big round as a barrel. This is baked once a year, in the spring, is piled up in stacks in the storerooms, and keeps good till the spring baking comes round again. It is very sweet and nutritious: one might easily fare worse than to have to make a meal of it with milk. On one of the storeroom shelves I spied an old wooden drinking-bowl, set away with dried peas in it. It had been broken, and riveted together in the bottom, but would no longer hold water, so had been degraded to this use. It had once been gayly painted, and had a motto in old Norwegian around the edge: "Drink in good-will, and give thanks to God." I coveted the thing, and offered to buy it. It was a study to see the old people consult with each other if they should let it go. It seemed that when they first went to housekeeping it had been given to them by the woman's mother, and was an old bowl even then. It was certainly over a hundred years old, and how much more there was no knowing. After long discussion they decided to sell it to me for four kroner (about one dollar), which the son thought (Sanna said) was a shameful price to ask for an old broken bowl. But he stood by in filial submission, and made no loud objection to the barter. The old woman also showed us a fine blanket, which had been spun and woven by her mother a hundred years ago. It was as gay of color and fantastic of design as if it had been made in Algiers. This too she was willing to sell for an absurdly small price, but it was too heavy to bring away. At weddings and other festivities these gay blankets are hung on the walls; and it is the custom for neighbors to lend all they can on such occasions.

The next farm we visited belonged to the richest people in Vos. It lay a half-mile still higher up, and the road leading to it seemed perilously steep. The higher we went, the greater the profusion of flowers: the stony way led us through tracts of bloom, in blue and gold; tall spikes of mullein in clumps like hollyhocks, and "shepherd's bells" in great purple patches.

The buildings of this farm were clustered around a sort of court-yard enclosure, roughly flagged by slate. Most of the roofs were also slated; one or two were thatched, and these thatched roofs were the only thing that redeemed the gloom of the spot, the sods on these being bright with pansies and grasses and waving raspberry bushes. Here also we found the men of the family alone at home, the women being gone on their summering at the sÆter. The youngest son showed us freely from room to room, and displayed with some pride the trunks full of blankets and linen, and the rows of women's dresses hanging in the chambers. On two sides of one large room these were hung thick one above another, no variety in them, and no finery; merely a succession of strong, serviceable petticoats, of black, green, or gray woollen. The gay jackets and stomachers were packed away in trunks; huge fur-lined coats, made of the same shape for men and for women, hung in the storeroom. Some of the trunks were red, painted in gay colors; some were of polished cedar, finished with fine brass mountings. As soon as a Norwegian girl approaches womanhood, one of these trunks is given her, set in its place in the clothes-room, and her accumulations begin. Clothes, bedding, and silver ornaments seem to be the only things for which the Norwegian peasant spends his money. In neither of these houses was there an article of superfluous furniture, not even of ordinary comfort. In both were the same bunk beds, built in under the eaves; the same loose, tossed straw, with blankets for covering; and only the coarsest wooden chairs and benches for seats. The young man opened his mother's trunk, and took from one corner a beautiful little silver beaker, with curling, prow-shaped handles. In this the old lady had packed away her silver brooches, buttons, and studs for the summer. Side by side with them, thrown in loosely among her white head-dresses and blouses, were half a dozen small twisted rolls of white bread. Sanna explained this by saying that the Norwegians never have this bread except at their most important festivals; it is considered a great luxury, and these had no doubt been put away as a future treat, as we should put away a bit of wedding-cake to keep. Very irreverently the son tipped out all his mother's ornaments into the bottom of the trunk, and proceeded to fill the little beaker with fiery brandy from a bottle which had been hid in another corner. From lip to lip it was passed, returning to him wellnigh untasted; but he poured the whole down at a draught, smacked his lips, and tossed the cup back into the trunk, dripping with the brandy. Very much that good old Norwegian dame, when she comes down in the autumn, will wonder, I fancy, what has happened to her nicely packed trunk of underclothes, dry bread, and old silver.

There were several storerooms in these farm buildings, and they were well filled with food, grain, flour, dried meats, fish, and towers of fladbrÖd. Looms with partly finished webs of cloth in them were there set away till winter; baskets full of carved yellow spoons hung on the wall. In one of the rooms, standing on the sill of the open window, were two common black glass bottles, with a few pond-lilies in each,—the only bit of decoration or token of love of the beautiful we had found. Seeing that I looked at the lilies with admiration, the young man took them out, wiped their dripping stems on his coat-sleeve, and presented them to me with a bow that a courtier might have envied. The grace, the courtesy, of the Norwegian peasant's bow is something that must date centuries back. Surely there is nothing in his life and surroundings to-day to create or explain it. It must be a trace of something that Olaf Tryggveson—that "magnificent, far-shining man"—scattered abroad in his kingdom eight hundred years ago, with his "bright, airy, wise way" of speaking and behaving to women and men.

One of the buildings on this farm was known, the young man said, to be at least two hundred years old. The logs are moss-grown and black, but it is good for hundreds of years yet. The first story is used now for a storeroom. From this a ladder led up to a half-chamber overhead, the front railed by a low railing; here, in this strange sort of balcony bedroom, had slept the children of the family, all the time under observation of their elders below.

Thrust in among the rafters, dark, rusty, bent, was an ancient sword. Our guide took it out and handed it to us, with a look of awe on his face. No one knew, he said, how long that sword had been on the farm. In the earliest writings by which the estate had been transferred, that sword had been mentioned, and it was a clause in every lease since that it should never be taken away from the place. However many times the farm might change hands, the sword must go with it, for all time. Was there no legend, no tradition, with it? None that his father or his father's father had ever heard; only the mysterious entailed charge, from generation to generation, that the sword must never be removed. The blade was thin and the edge jagged, the handle plain and without ornament; evidently the sword had been for work, and not for show. There was something infinitely solemn in its inalienable estate of safe and reverent keeping at the hands of men all ignorant of its history. It is by no means impossible that it had journeyed in the company of that Sigurd who sailed with his splendid fleet of sixty ships for Palestine, early in the twelfth century. Sigurd Jorsalafarer, or Traveller to Jerusalem, he was called; and no less an authority than Thomas Carlyle vouches for him as having been "a wise, able, and prudent man," reigning in a "solid and successful way." Through the Straits of Gibraltar to Jerusalem, home by way of Constantinople and Russia, "shining with renown," he sailed, and took a hand in any fighting he found going on by the way. Many of his men came from the region of the Sogne Fjord; and the more I thought of it the surer I felt that this old sword had many a time flashed on the deck of his ships.

Our second day opened rainy. The lake was blotted out by mist; on the fence under the willows sat half a dozen men, roosting as unconcernedly as if it were warm sunshine.

"It does wonder me," said Sanna, "that I find here so many men standing idle. When the railroad come, it shall be that the life must be different."

A heroic English party, undeterred by weather, were setting off in carioles and on horseback. Delays after delays occurred to hinder them. At the last moment their angry courier was obliged to go and fetch the washing, which had not arrived. There is a proverb in Norway, "When the Norwegian says 'immediately,' look for him in half an hour."

Finally, at noon, in despair of sunshine, we also set off: rugs, water-proofs; the india-rubber boot of the carriage drawn tight up to the level of our eyes; we set off in pouring sheets of rain for Gudvangen. For the first two hours the sole variation of the monotony of our journey was in emptying the boot of water once every five minutes, just in time to save a freshet in our laps. High mountain peaks, black with forests or icy white with snow, gleamed in and out of the clouds on either hand, as we toiled and splashed along. Occasional lightings up revealed stretches of barren country, here and there a cluster of farm-houses or a lowly church. On the shores of a small lake we passed one of these lonely churches. Only two other buildings were in sight in the vast expanse: one, the wretched little inn where we were to rest our horses for half an hour; the other, the parsonage. This last was a pretty little cottage, picturesquely built of yellow pine, half bowered in vines, looking in that lonely waste as if it had lost itself and strayed away from some civilized spot. The pastor and his sister, who kept house for him, were away; but his servant was so sure that they would like to have us see their home that we allowed her to show it to us. It was a tasteful and cosey little home: parlor, study, and dining-room, all prettily carpeted and furnished; books, flowers, a sewing-machine, and a piano. It did one's heart good to see such an oasis of a home in the wilderness. Drawn up on rests in a shed near the house, was an open boat, much like a wherry. The pastor spent hours every day, the maid said, in rowing on the lake. It was his great pleasure.

Up, up we climbed: past fir forests, swamps, foaming streams,—the wildest, weirdest road storm-driven people ever crossed. Spite of the rain, half-naked children came flying out of hovels and cabins to open gates: sometimes there would be six in a row, their thin brown hands all stretched for alms, and their hollow eyes begging piteously; then they would race on ahead to open the next gate. The moors seemed but a succession of enclosed pasture-lands. Now and then we passed a little knot of cabins close to the road, and men who looked kindly, but as wild as wild beasts, would come out and speak to the driver; their poverty was direful to see. At last, at the top of a high hill, we halted; the storm stayed; the clouds lifted and blew off. At our feet lay a black chasm; it was like looking down into the bowels of the earth. This was the Nerodal Valley; into it we were to descend. Its walls were three and four thousand feet high. It looked little more than a cleft. The road down this precipitous wall is a marvel of engineering. It is called the Stalheimscleft, and was built by a Norwegian officer, Captain Finne. It is made in a series of zigzagging loops, which are so long and so narrow that the descent at no point appears steep; yet as one looks up from any loop to the loop next above, it seems directly over his head. Down this precipice into the Nerodal Valley leap two grand fosses, the Stalheimfos and the Salvklevfos; roaring in ceaseless thunder, filling the air, and drenching the valley with spray. Tiny grass-grown spaces between the bowlders and the loops of the road had all been close mowed; spaces which looked too small for the smallest reaping-hook to swing in were yet close shorn, and the little handfuls of hay hung up drying on hand's-breadths of fence set up for the purpose. Even single blades of grass are too precious in Norway to be wasted.

As we walked slowly down this incredible road, we paused step by step to look first up, then down. The carriage waiting for us below on the bridge looked like a baby wagon. The river made by the meeting of these two great cataracts at the base of the precipice was only a little silver thread flowing down the valley. The cataracts seemed leaping from the sky, and the sky seemed resting on the hill-tops; masses of whirling and floating clouds added to the awesome grandeur of the scene. The Stalheimfos fell into a deep, basin-shaped ravine, piled with great bowlders, and full of birch and ash shrubs; in the centre of this, by some strange play of the water, rose a distinct and beautifully shaped cone, thrown up closely in front of the fall, almost blending with it, and thick veiled in the tumultuous spray,—a fountain in a waterfall. It seemed the accident of a moment, but its shape did not alter so long as we watched it; it is a part of the fall.

Five miles down this cleft, called valley, to Gudvangen run the road and the little river and the narrow strips of meadow, dark, thin, and ghastly; long months in utter darkness this Nerodal lies, and never, even at summer's best and longest, has it more than a half-day of sun. The mountains rise in sheer black walls on either hand,—bare rock in colossal shafts and peaks, three, four, and even five thousand feet high; snow in the rifts at top; patches of gaunt firs here and there; great spaces of tumbled rocks, where avalanches have slid; pebbly and sandy channels worn from side to side of the valley, where torrents have rushed down and torn a way across; white streams from top to bottom of the precipices, all foam and quiver, like threads spun out on the sward, more than can be counted; they seem to swing down out of the sky as spider threads swing swift and countless in a dewy morning.

Sanna shuddered. "Now you see, one could not spend a whole day in Nerodal Valley," she said. "It does wonder me that any people will live here. Every spring the mountains do fall and people are killed."

On a narrow rim of land at base of these walls, just where the fjord meets the river, is the village of Gudvangen, a desolate huddle of half a dozen poor houses. A chill as of death filled the air; foul odors arose at every turn. The two little inns were overcrowded with people, who roamed restlessly up and down, waiting for they knew not what. An indescribable gloom settles on Gudvangen with nightfall. The black waters of the fjord chafing monotonously at the base of the black mountains; the sky black also, and looking farther off than sky ever looked before, walled into a strip, like the valley beneath it; hemmed in, forsaken, doomed, and left seems Gudvangen. What hold life can have on a human being kept in such a spot it is hard to imagine. Yet we found three very old women hobnobbing contentedly there in a cave of a hut. Ragged, dirty, hideous, hopeless one would have thought them; but they were all agog and cheery, and full of plans for repairing their house. They were in a little log stable, perhaps ten feet square, and hardly high enough to stand upright in: they were cowering round a bit of fire in the centre; their piles of straw and blankets laid in corners; not a chair, not a table. Macbeth's witches had seemed full-dressed society women by the side of these. We peered timidly in at the group, and they all came running towards us, chattering, glad to see strangers, and apologizing for their condition, because, as they said, they had just turned in there together for a few days, while their house across the way was being mended. Not a light of any description had they, except the fire. The oldest one hobbled away, and returned with a small tallow candle, which she lit and held in her hand, to show us how comfortable they were, after all; plenty of room for three piles of straw on the rough log floor. Their "house across the way" was a little better than this; not much. One of the poor old crones had "five children in America." "They wanted her to come out to America and live with them, but she was too old to go away from home," she said. "Home was the best place for old people," to which the other two assented eagerly. "Oh, yes, home was the best place. America was too far."

It seemed a miracle to have comfort in an inn in so poverty-stricken a spot as this, but we did. We slept in straw-filled bunks, set tight into closets under the eaves; only a narrow doorway by which to get in and out of bed; but there were two windows in the room, and no need to stifle. And for supper there was set before us a stew of lamb, delicately flavored with curry, and served with rice, of which no house need be ashamed. That so palatable a dish could have issued from the place which answered for kitchen in that poor little inn was a marvel; it was little more than a small dark tomb. The dishes were all washed out-of-doors in tubs set on planks laid across two broken chairs at the kitchen door; and the food and milk were kept in an above-ground cellar not three steps from the same door. This had been made by an immense slab of rock which had crashed down from the mountain top, one day, and instead of tearing through the house and killing everybody had considerately lodged on top of two other bowlders, roofing the space in, and forming a huge stone refrigerator ready to hand for the innkeeper. The enclosed space was cold as ice, and high enough and large enough for one to walk about in it comfortably. I had the curiosity to ask this innkeeper how much he could make in a year off his inn. When he found that I had no sinister motive in the inquiry, he was freely communicative. At first he feared, Sanna said, that it might become known in the town how much money he was making, and that demands might be made on him in consequence. If the season of summer travel were very good, he said he would clear two hundred dollars; but he did not always make so much as that. He earned a little also by keeping a small shop, and in the winter that was his only resource. He had a wife and two children, and his wife was not strong, which made it harder for them, as they were obliged always to keep a servant.

Even in full sunlight, at nine of the morning, Gudvangen looked grim and dangerous, and the NerÖ Fjord water black. As we sailed out, the walls of the valley closed up suddenly behind us, as with a snap which might have craunched poor little Gudvangen to death. The fjord is as wild as the pass; in fact, the same thing, only that it has water at bottom instead of land, and you can sail closer than you can drive at base of the rocky walls. Soon we came to the mouth of another great fjord, opening up another watery road into the mountains; this was the Aurland, and on its farther shore opened again the Sognedal Fjord, up which we went a little way to leave somebody at a landing. Here were green hills and slopes and trees, and a bright yellow church, shaped like a blancmange mould in three pyramid-shaped cones, each smaller than the one below.

"Here is the finest fruit orchard in all Scandinavia," said Sanna, pointing to a pretty place just out of the town, where fields rose one above the other in terraces on south-facing slopes, covered thick with orchards. "It belongs to an acquainted with me: but she must sell it. She is a widow, and she cannot take the care to herself."

Back again across the mouth of the Aurland Fjord, and then out into the great Sogne Fjord, zigzagging from side to side of it, and up into numerous little fjords where the boat looked to be steering straight into hills,—we seemed to be adrift, without purpose, rather than on a definite voyage with a fixed aim of getting home. The magnificent labyrinths of walled waters were calm as the heavens they reflected; the clouds above and clouds below kept silent pace with each other, and we seemed gliding between two skies. Great snow fjelds came in sight, wheeled, rose, sank, and disappeared, as we passed; sometimes green meadows stretched on either side of us, then terrible gorges and pinnacles of towering rock. Picture after picture we saw, of gay-colored little villages, with rims of fields and rocky promontories; snow fjelds above, and fir forests between; glittering waterfalls shooting from the sky line to the water, like white lightning down a black stone front, or leaping out in spaces of feathery snow, like one preternatural blooming of the forests all the way down the black walls rising perpendicularly thousands of feet; tiers of blue mountains in the distance, dark blue on the nearest, and shading off to palest blue at the sky line; the fjord dark purple in the narrows, shading to gray in the opens; illuminated spaces of green, now at the shore, now half-way up, now two-thirds-way up to the sky; tops of hills in sunlight; bars of sunlight streaming through dark clefts. Then a storm-sweep across the fjord, far in our wake,—swooping and sweeping, and gone in a half-hour; blotting out the mountains; then turning them into a dark-slate wall, on which white sails and cross-sunbeams made a superb shining. And so, between the sun and the storm, we came to Valestrand, and sent off and took on boat-loads of pleasuring people,—the boats with bright flags at prow and stern, and gay-dressed women with fantastic parasols like butterflies poised on their edges,—Valestrand, where, as some say, Frithiof was born; and as all say, he burnt one of Balder's great temples. Then Ladvik, on a green slope turning to gold in the sun; its white church with a gray stone spire relieved against a bank of purple gloom; the lights sinking lower and the shadows stretching farther every minute; shadows of hills behind which the sun had already gone, thrown sharp and black on hills still glowing in full light; hills before us, shimmering in soft silver gray and pale purple against a clear golden west; hills behind us, folding and folded in masses of rosy vapor; shining fosses leaping down among them; the colors changing like the colors of a prism minute by minute along the tops of the ranges,—this was the way our day on the Sogne Fjord drew near its ending. Industriously knitting, with eyes firm fastened on her needles, sat an English matron near us on the deck. Not one glance of her eye did she give to the splendors of sky and water and land about her.

"I do think that lady must be in want of stockings very much," remarked Sanna quietly; "but she need not to come to Norway to knit."

Far worse, however, than the woman who knitted were the women and the men who talked, loudly, stupidly, vulgarly, around us. It was mortifying that their talk was English, but they were not Americans. At last they drove us to another part of the deck, but not before a few phrases of their conversation had been indelibly stamped on my memory.

"Well, we were in Dresden two days: there's only the gallery there; that's time enough for that."

"Raphaels,—lots of Raphaels."

"I don't care for Raphaels, anyhow. I'll tell you who I like; I like Veronese."

"Well, I'm very fond of Tintoretto."

"I like Titians; they're so delicate, don't you know?"

"Well, who's that man that's painted such dreadful things,—all mixed up, don't you know? In some places you see a good many of them."

"You don't mean Rembrandt, do you? There are a lot of Rembrandts in Munich."

"There was one picture I liked. I think it was a Christ; but I ain't sure. There were four children on the ground, I remember."

When the real sunset came we were threading the rocky labyrinths of the Bergen Fjord. It is a field of bowlders, with an ocean let in; nothing more. Why the bowlders are not submerged, since the water is deep enough for big ships to sail on, is the perpetual marvel; but they are not. They are as firm in their places as continents, myriads of them only a few feet out of water; and when the sun as it sinks sends a flood of gold and red light athwart them, they turn all colors, and glow on the water like great smoke crystals with fire shining through. To sail up this fjord in the sunset is to wind through devious lanes walled with these jewels, and to look off, over and above them, to fields of purple and gray and green, islands on islands on islands, to the right and to the left, with the same jewel-walled lanes running east and west and north and south among them; the sky will stream with glowing colors from horizon to horizon, and the glorious silence will be broken by no harsher sound than the low lapsing of waters and the soft whirr of gray gulls' wings.

And so we came to Bergen in the bright midnight of the last of our four days.

Months afterwards Sanna sent me a few extracts from descriptions given by a Norwegian writer of some of the spots we had seen in the dim upper distances along the fjords,—some of those illuminated spaces of green high up among the crags, which looked such sunny and peaceful homes.

Her English is so much more graphic than mine that I have begged her permission to give the extracts as she wrote them:—

"Grand, glorious, and serious is the Sogne Fjord. Serious in itself, and still more serious we find it when we know where and how people do live there between mountains. And we must wonder or ask, Is there really none places left, or no kind of work for those people to get for the maintenance of the life, but to go to such desolate and rather impassable a place?...

"More than half of the year are the two families who live on the farm of Vetti separated from all other human beings. During the winter can the usual path in the grass not be passed in case of snow, ice, and perpetual slips, which leave behind trace long out in the summer, because the sun only for a short time came over this long enormous abyss, and does not linger there long, so that the snow which has been to ice do melt very slow, and seldom disappear earlier than in July. The short time in the winter when the river Utla is frozen may the bottom of the pass well be passed, though not without danger, on account of the mentioned slips, which, with the power of the hurricane, are whizzing down in the deep, and which merely pressure of the air is so strong that it throw all down.

"Late in the autumn and in the spring is all approach to and from Vetti quite stopped; and late in the autumn chiefly with ground and snow slips, which then get loosened by the frequent rain. The farm-houses is situate on a steep slope, so that the one end of the lowest beam is put on the mere ground, and the other end must be put on a wall almost three yards high. The fields are so steep, and so quite near the dreadful precipice, that none unaccustomed to it do venture one's self thither; and when one from here look over the pass, and look the meadows which is more hanging than laying over the deep, and which have its grass mowed down with a short scythe, then one cannot comprehend the desperate courage which risk to set about and occupy one's self here, while the abyss has opened its swallow for receiving the foolhardy.

"A little above the dwelling-houses is a quite tolerable plain; and when one ask the man why he has not built his houses there, he answers that owing to the snow-slips it is impossible to build there.

"Through the valley-streams the Afdals River comes from the mountains, run in a distance of only twenty yards from the farm-houses, and about one hundred yards from the same pour out itself with crash of thunder in a mighty foss. The rumble of the same, and that with its hurling out caused pressure of the air, is in the summer so strong that the dwelling-houses seems to shiver, and all what fluids there in open vessels get placed on the table is on an incessant trembling, moving almost as on board a ship in a rough sea. The wall and windows which turns to the river are then always moistened of the whipped foam, which in small particles continually is thrown back from the foss.

"By the side of this foss, in the hard granite wall which it moisten, is a mined gut (the author says he can't call it a road, though it is reckoned for that), broad enough that one man, and in the highest one small well-trained horse, however not by each other's side, can walk therein. This gut, which vault is not so high that an full-grown man can walk upright, is the farm's only road which rise to a considerable height.

"But as this gut could not get lightened in a suitable height, one has filled up or finished the remaining gap with four timber beams, four or five yards long, which is close to the gut, and with its upper end leans on a higher small mountain peak, which beside this is the fastening for the bridge over the waterfall. In these beams is cut in flukes, just as the steps of a staircase, and when one walks up these flukes one looks between the beams the frothing foss beneath one's self, while one get wrapped up of its exhalation clouds.

"The man told me that the pass also is to be passed with horse, the time of the summer, and that all then is to be carried in a pack-saddle to the farm, of his own horse, which is accustomed to this trip. And when one know the small LÆrdalske horses' easiness, and the extraordinary security wherewith they can go upon the most narrow path on the edge of the most dreadful precipices, in that they place or cast the feet so in front of each other that no path is too narrow for them, then it seems a little less surprising.

"From the Vetti farm continues the pass in a distance of about twenty-one English miles, so that the whole pass, then, is a little more than twenty-four miles, and shall on the other side of the farm be still more narrow, more difficult, and more dreadful. The farmer himself and his people must often go there to the woods, and for other things for his farm. There belongs to this farm most excellent sÆter and mountain fields, wherefore the cattle begetting is here of great importance; and also the most excellent tract of firs belong to this farm.

"I was curious to know how one had to behave from here to get the dead buried, when it was impossible that two men could walk by the side of each other through the pass, and I did even not see how one could carry any coffin on horseback. I got the following information: The corpse is to be laid on a thin board, in which there is bored holes in both ends in which there is to be put handles of rope; to this board is the corpse to be tied, wrapped up in its linen cloth. And now one man in the front and one behind carry it through the pass to the farm Gjelde, and here it is to be laid into the coffin, and in the common manner brought to the churchyard. If any one die in the winter, and the bottom of the pass must be impassable then as well as in the spring and in the autumn, one must try to keep the corpse in an hard frozen state, which is not difficult, till it can be brought down in the above-mentioned manner.

"A still more strange and sad manner was used once at a cottager place called Vermelien. This place is lying in the little valley which border to the Vetti's field. Its situation by the river deep down in the pass is exceedingly horrid, and it has none other road or path than a very steep and narrow foot-path along the mountain wall side with the most dreadful precipice as by the Vetti.

"Since the cottager people here generally had changed, no one had dead there. It happened, then, the first time a boy, on seventeen years old, died. One did not do one's self any hesitation about the manner to bring him to his grave, and they made a coffin in the house. The corpse was put in the coffin, and then the coffin brought outside; and first now one did see with consternation that it was not possible to carry the corpse with them in this manner. What was to do then?

"At last they resolved to let the coffin be left as a memento mori, and to place the dead upon a horse, his feet tied up under the belly of the horse; against the mane on the horse was fastened a well-stuffed fodder bag, that the corpse may lean to the same, to which again the corpse was tied. And so the dead must ride over the mountain to his resting-place by Fortun's church in Lyster."

THE KATRINA SAGA.

I.

"Forr English Ladies." This was the address on the back of a much-thumbed envelope, resting on top of the key-rack in the dining-room of our Bergen hotel. If "For" had been spelled correctly, the letter would not have been half so likely to be read; but that extra outsider of an r was irresistibly attractive. The words of the letter itself were, if not equally original in spelling, at least as unique in arrangement, and altogether the advertisement answered its purposes far better than if it had been written in good English. The naÏvetÉ with which the writer went on to say, "I do recommend me," was delicious; and when she herself appeared there was something in her whole personal bearing entirely in keeping with the childlike and unconscious complacency of her phraseology. "I do recommend me" was written all over her face; and, as things turned out, if it had been "I do guarantee me," it had not been too strong an indorsement. A more tireless, willing, thoughtful, helpful, eager, shrewd little creature than Katrina never chattered. Looking back from the last day to the first of my acquaintance with her, I feel a remorseful twinge as I think how near I came to taking instead of her, as my maid for a month's journeying, a stately young woman, who, appearing in answer to my advertisement, handed me her card with dignity, and begged my pardon for inquiring precisely what it would be that she would have to do for me, besides the turning of English into Norwegian and vice versa. The contrast between this specific gravity and Katrina's hearty and unreflecting "I will do my best to satisfy you in all occasions," did not sufficiently impress me in the outset. But many a time afterward did I recall it, and believe more than ever in the doctrine of lucky stars and good angels.

When Katrina appeared, punctually to the appointed minute, half an hour before the time for setting off, I saw with pleasure that she was wrapped in a warm cloak of dark cloth. I had seen her before, flitting about in shawls of various sorts, loosely pinned at the throat in a disjointed kind of way, which gave to her appearance an expression that I did not like,—an expression of desultory if not intermittent respectability. But wrapped in this heavy cloak, she was decorum personified.

"Ah, Katrina," I said, "I am very glad to see you are warmly dressed. This summer you keep in Norway is so cold, one needs winter clothes all the time."

"Yes, I must," she replied. "I get fever and ague in New York, and since then it always reminds me. That was six years ago; but it reminds me,—the freezing at my neck," putting her hand to the back of her neck.

It was in New York, then, that she had learned so much English. This explained everything,—the curious mixture of volubility and inaccuracy and slang in her speech. She had been for several months a house-servant in New York, "with an Irish lady; such a nice lady. Her husband, he took care of a bank: kept it clean, don't you see, and all such tings. And we lived in the top in the eight story: we was always going up and down in the elewator."

After this she had been a button-hole maker in a great clothing-house, and next, had married one of her own countrymen; a nephew, by the way, of the famous Norwegian giant at Barnum's Museum,—a fact which Katrina stated simply, without any apparent boast, adding, "My husband's father were guyant, too. There be many guyants in that part of the country."

Perhaps it was wicked, seeing that Katrina had had such hopes of learning much English in her month with me, not to have told her then and there that g in the English word giant was always soft. But I could not. Neither did I once, from first to last, correct her inimitable and delicious pronunciations. I confined my instructions to the endeavor to make her understand clearly the meanings of words, and to teach her true synonymes; but as for meddling with her pronunciations, I would as soon have been caught trying to teach a baby to speak plain. I fear, towards the last, she began to suspect this, and to be half aware of the not wholly disinterested pleasure which I took in listening to her eager prattle; but she did not accuse me, and I let her set off for home not one whit wiser in the matter of the sounds of the English language than she had been when she came away, except so far as she might have unconsciously caught them from hearing me speak. It is just as well: her English is quite good enough as it is, for all practical purposes in Norway, and would lose half its charm and value to English-speaking people if she were to learn to say the words as we say them.

To set off by boat from Bergen means to set off by boats; it would not be an idle addition to the phrase, either, to say, not only by boats, but among boats, in, out, over, and across boats; and one may consider himself lucky if he is not called upon to add,—the whole truth being told,—under boats. Arriving at the wharf, he is shown where his steamer lies, midway in the harbor; whether it be at anchor, or hoisted on a raft of small boats, he is at first at a loss to see. However, rowing alongside, he discovers that the raft of small boats is only a crowd, like any other crowd, of movable things or creatures, and can be shoved, jostled, pushed out of the way, and compelled to give room. A Norwegian can elbow his boat through a tight-packed mass of boats with as dexterous and irresistible force as another man can elbow his way on foot, on dry land, in a crowd of men. So long as you are sitting quiet in the middle of the boat, merely swayed from side to side by his gyrations, with no sort of responsibility as to their successive direction, and with implicit faith in their being right, it is all very well. But when your Norwegian springs up, confident, poises one foot on the edge of his own boat, the other foot on the edge of another boat, plants one of his oars against the gunwale of a third boat, and rests the other oar hard up against the high side of a steamboat, and then authoritatively requests you to rise and make pathway for yourself across and between all these oars and boats, and leap varying chasms of water between them and the ladder up the steamer's side, dismay seizes you, if you are not to the water born. I did not hear of anybody's being drowned in attempting to get on board a Bergen steamer. But why somebody is not, every day in the week, I do not know, if it often happens to people to thread and surmount such a labyrinth of small rocking boats as lay around the dampskib "Jupiter," in which Katrina and I sailed for Christiania.

The Northern nations of Europe seem to have hit upon signally appropriate names for that place of torment which in English is called steamboat. There are times when simply to pronounce the words dampskib or dampbaad is soothing to the nerves; and nowhere oftener than in Norway can one be called upon to seek such relief. It is an accepted thing in Norway that no steamboat can be counted on either to arrive or depart within one, two, or three hours of its advertised time. The guide-books all state this fact; so nobody who, thus forewarned, has chosen to trust himself to the dampskib has any right to complain if the whole plan of his journey is disarranged and frustrated by the thing's not arriving within four hours of the time it had promised. But it is not set down in the guide-books, as it ought to be, that there is something else on which the traveller in Norwegian dampskibs can place no dependence whatever; and that is the engaging beforehand of his stateroom. To have engaged a stateroom one week beforehand, positively, explicitly, and then, upon arriving on board, to be confronted by a smiling captain, who states in an off-hand manner, as if it were an every-day occurrence, that "he is very sorry, but it is impossible to let you have it;" and who, when he is pressed for an explanation of the impossibility, has no better reason to give than that two gentlemen wanted the stateroom, and as the two gentlemen could not go in the ladies' cabin, and you, owing to the misfortune of your sex, could, therefore the two gentlemen have the stateroom, and you will take the one remaining untenanted berth in the cabin,—this is what may happen in a Norwegian dampskib. If one is resolute enough to halt in the gangway, and, ordering the porters bearing the luggage to halt also, say calmly, "Very well; then I must return to my hotel, and wait for another boat, in which I can have a stateroom; it would be quite out of the question, my making the journey in the cabin," the captain will discover some way of disposing of the two gentlemen, and without putting them into the ladies' cabin; but this late concession, not to the justice of your claim, only to your determination in enforcing it, does not in any wise conciliate your respect or your amiability. The fact of the imposition and unfairness is the same. I ought to say, however, that this is the only matter in which I found unfairness in Norway. In regard to everything else the Norwegian has to provide or to sell, he is just and honest; but when it comes to the question of dampskib accommodations, he seems to take leave of all his sense of obligation to be either.

As I crept into the narrow trough called a berth, in my hardly won stateroom, a vision flitted past the door: a tall and graceful figure, in a tight, shabby black gown; a classic head, set with the grace of a lily on a slender neck; pale brown hair, put back, braided, and wound in a knot behind, all save a few short curls, which fell lightly floating and waving over a low forehead; a pair of honest, merry gray eyes, with a swift twinkle at the corners, and a sudden serious tenderness in their depths; a straight nose, with a nostril spirited and fine as an Arabian's; a mouth of flawless beauty, unless it might be that the upper lip was a trifle too short, but this fault only added to the piquancy of the face. I lifted myself on my elbow to look at her. She was gone; and I sank back, thinking of the pictures that the world raved over, so few short years ago, of the lovely EugÉnie. Here was a face strangely like hers, but with far more fire and character,—a Norwegian girl, evidently poor. I was wondering if I should see her again, and how I could manage to set Katrina on her track, and if I could find out who she was, when, lo, there she stood by my side, bending above me, and saying something Norwegian over and over in a gentle voice; and Katrina behind her, saying, "This is the lady what has care of all. She do say, 'Poor lady, poor lady, to be so sick!' She is sorry that you are sick." I gazed at her in stupefied wonder. This radiant creature the stewardess of a steamboat! She was more beautiful near than at a distance. I am sure I have never seen so beautiful a woman. And coming nearer, one could see clearly, almost as radiant as her physical beauty, the beauty of a fine and sweet nature shining through. Her smile was transcendent. I am not over-easy to be stirred by women's fair looks. Seldom I see a woman's face that gives me unalloyed pleasure. Faces are half-terrifying things to one who studies them, such paradoxical masks are they; only one half mask, and the other half bared secrets of a lifetime. Their mere physical beauty, however great it may be, is so underlaid and overlaid by tokens and traces and scars of things in which the flesh and blood of it have played part that a fair face can rarely be more than half fair. But here was a face with beauty such as the old Greeks put into marble; and shining through it the honesty and innocence of an untaught child, the good-will and content of a faithful working-girl, and the native archness of a healthful maiden. I am not unaware that all this must have the sound of an invention, and there being no man to bear witness to my tale, except such as have sailed in the Norwegian dampskib "Jupiter," it will not be much believed; nevertheless, I shall tell it. Not being the sort of artist to bring the girl's face away in a portfolio, the only thing left for me is to try to set it in the poor portraiture of words. Poor enough portraiture it is that words can fashion, even for things less subtle than faces,—a day or a sky, a swift passion or a thought. Words seem always to those who work with them more or less failures; but most of all are they impotent and disappointing when a face is to be told. Yet I shall not cast away my sketch of the beautiful Anna. It is the only one which will ever be made of her. Now that I think of it, however, there is one testimony to be added to mine,—a testimony of much weight, too, taken in the connection, for it was of such involuntariness.

On the second day of my voyage in the "Jupiter," in the course of a conversation with the captain, I took occasion to speak of the good-will and efficiency of his stewardess. He assented warmly to my praise of her; adding that she was born of very poor parents, and had little education herself beyond knowing how to read and write, but was a person of rare goodness.

I then said, "And of very rare beauty, also. I have never seen a more beautiful face."

"Yes," he replied; "there is something very not common about her. Her face is quite antic." "Antique," he meant, but for the first few seconds I could not imagine what it was he had intended. He also, then, had recognized, as this phrase shows, the truly classic quality of the girl's beauty; and he is the only witness I am able to bring to prove that my description of her face and figure and look and bearing are not an ingenious fable wrought out of nothing.

From Katrina, also, there came testimonies to Anna's rare quality.

"I have been in long speech with Anna," she said before we had been at sea a day. "I tink she will come to Bergen, by my husband and me. She can be trusted; I can tell in one firstest minute vat peoples is to be trusted. She is so polite always, but she passes ghentlemens without speaking, except she has business. I can tell."

Shrewd Katrina! Her husband has a sort of restaurant and billiard-room in Bergen,—a place not over-creditable, I fear, although keeping within the pale of respectability. It is a sore trial to Katrina, his doing this, especially the selling of liquor. She had several times refused her consent to his going into the business, "but dis time," she said, "he had it before I knowed anyting, don't you see? He didn't tell me. I always tink dere is de wifes and children, and maybe de mens don't take home no bread; and den to sit dere and drink, it is shame, don't you see? But if he don't do, some other mans would; so tere it is, don't you see? And tere is money in it, you see." Poor Katrina had tried in vain to shelter herself and appease her conscience by this old sophistry. Her pride and self-respect still so revolted at the trade that she would not go to the place to stay. "He not get me to go tere. He not want me, either. I would not work in such a place."

But she had no scruples about endeavoring to engage Anna as a waiter-girl for the place.

"She will be by my husband and me," she said, "and it is always shut every night at ten o'clock; and my husband is very strict man. He will have all right. She can have all her times after dat; and here she have only four dollars a mont, and my husband gives more tan dat. And I shall teach to her English; I gives her one hour every day. Dat is great for her, for she vill go to America next year. If she can English speak, she get twice the money in America. Oh, ven I go to America, I did not know de name of one ting; and every night I cry and cry; I tink I never learn; but dat Irish lady I live by, she vas so kind to me as my own mother. Oh, I like Irish peoples; the Irish and the Americans, dey are what I like best. I don't like de English; and Chermans, I don't like dem; dey vill take all out of your pocket. She is intended;[9] and dat is good. When one are intended one must be careful; and if he is one you love, ten you don't vant to do anyting else; and her sweetheart is a nice young fellow. He is in the engyne in a Hamburg boat. She has been speaking by me about him."

The dampskib "Jupiter" is a roller. It is a marvel how anything not a log can roll at such a rate. The stateroom berths being built across instead of lengthwise, the result is a perpetual tossing of heads versus feet. As Katrina expressively put it, "It is first te head, and den te feets up. Dat is te worstest. Dat makes te difference."

Ill, helpless, almost as tight-wedged in as a knife-blade shut in its handle, I lay in my trough a day and a night. The swinging port-hole, through which I feebly looked, made a series of ever-changing vignettes of the bits of water, sky, land it showed: moss-crowned hillocks of stone; now and then a red roof, or a sloop scudding by. The shore of Norway is a kaleidoscope of land, rock, and water broken up. To call it shore at all seems half a misnomer. I have never heard of a census of the islands on the Norway coast, but it would be a matter of great interest to know if it needs the decimals of millions to reckon them. This would not be hard to be believed by one who has sailed two days and two nights in their labyrinths. They are a more distinctive feature in the beauty of Norway's seaward face than even her majestic mountain ranges. They have as much and as changing beauty of color as those, and, added to the subtle and exhaustless beauty of changing color, they have the still subtler charm of that mysterious combination of rest and restlessness, stillness and motion, solidity and evanescence, which is the dower of all islands, and most of all of the islands of outer seas. Even more than from the stern solemnity of their mountain-walled fjords must the Norwegians have drawn their ancient inspirations, I imagine, from the wooing, baffling, luring, forbidding, locking and unlocking, and never-revealing vistas, channels, gates, and barriers of their islands. They are round and soft and mossy as hillocks of sphagnum in a green marsh. You may sink above your ankles in the moist, delicious verdure, which looks from the sea like a mere mantle lightly flung over the rock. Or they are bare and gray and unbroken, as if coated in mail of stone; and you might clutch in vain for so much as the help of a crevice or a shrub, if you were cast on their sides. Some lie level and low, with oases of vividest green in their hollows; these lift and loom in the noon or the twilight, with a mirage which the desert cannot outdo. Some rise up in precipices of sudden wall, countless Gibraltars, which no mortal power can scale, and only wild creatures with tireless wings can approach. They are lashed by foaming waves, and the echoes peal like laughter among them; the tide brings them all it has; the morning sun lights them up, top after top, like beacons of its way out to sea, and leaves them again at night, lingeringly, one by one; changing them often into the semblance of jewels by the last red rays of its sinking light. They seem, as you sail swiftly among them, to be sailing too, a flotilla of glittering kingdoms; your escort, your convoy; shifting to right, to left, in gorgeous parade of skilful display, as for a pageant. When you anchor, they too are of a sudden at rest; solid, substantial land again, wooing you to take possession. There are myriads of them still unknown, untrodden, and sure to remain so forever, no matter how long the world may last; as sure as if the old spells were true, and the gods had made them invincible by a charm, or lonely under an eternal curse. At the mouths of the great fjords they seem sometimes to have fallen back and into line, as if to do honor to whomever might come sailing in. They must have greatly helped the splendor of the processions of viking ships, a thousand years ago, in the days when a viking thought nothing of setting sail for the south or the east with six or seven hundred ships in his fleet. If their birch-trees were as plumy then as now, there was nothing finer than they in all that a viking adorned his ships with, not even the gilt dragons at the prow.

Before the close of the second day of our voyage, the six passengers in the ladies' cabin had reached the end of their journey and left the boat. By way of atonement for his first scheming to rob me of my stateroom, the captain now magnanimously offered to me the whole of the ladies' cabin, for which he had no further use. How gladly I accepted it! How gleefully I watched my broad bed being made on a sofa, lengthwise the rolling "Jupiter"! How pleased was Katrina, how cheery the beautiful stewardess!

"Good-night! Good-night! Sleep well! Sleep well!" they both said as they left me.

"Now it will be different; not te head and feets any more. De oder way is bestest," added Katrina, as she lurched out of the room.

How triumphantly I locked the door! How well I slept! All of which would be of no consequence here, except that it makes such a background for what followed. Out of a sleep sound as only the sleep of one worn out by seasickness can be, I was roused by a dash of water in my face. Too bewildered at first to understand what had happened, I sat up in bed quickly, and thereby brought my face considerably nearer the port-hole, directly above my pillow, just in time to receive another full dash of water in my very teeth; and water by no means clean, either, as I instantly perceived. The situation explained itself. The port-hole had not been shut tight; the decks were being washed. Swash, swash, it came, with frightful dexterity, aimed, it would seem, at that very port-hole, and nowhere else. I sprang up, seized the handle of the port-hole window, and tried to tighten it. In my ignorance and fright I turned it the wrong way; in poured the dirty water. There stood I, clapping the window to with all my might, but utterly unable either to fasten it or to hold it tight enough to keep out the water. Calling for help was useless, even if my voice could have been heard above the noise of the boat; the door of my cabin was locked. Swash, swash, in it came, more and more, and dirtier and dirtier; trickling down the back of the red velvet sofa, drenching my pillows and sheets, and spattering me. One of the few things one never ceases being astonished at in this world is the length a minute can seem when one is uncomfortable. It couldn't have been many minutes, but it seemed an hour, before I had succeeded in partially fastening that port-hole, unlocking that cabin door, and bringing Anna to the rescue. Before she arrived the dirty swashes had left the first port-hole and gone to the second, which, luckily, had been fastened tight, and all danger was over. But if I had been afloat and in danger of drowning, her sympathy could not have been greater. She came running, her feet bare,—very white they were, too, and rosy pink on the outside edges, like a baby's, I noticed,—and her gown but partly on. It was only half-past four, and she had been, no doubt, as sound asleep as I. With comic pantomime of distress, and repeated exclamations of "Poor lady, poor lady!" which phrase I already knew by heart, she gathered up the wet bed, made me another in a dry corner, and then vanished; and I heard her telling the tale of my disaster, in excited tones, to Katrina, who soon appeared with a look half sympathy, half amusement, on her face.

"Now, dat is great tings," she said, giving the innocent port-hole another hard twist at the handle. "I tink you vill be glad ven you comes to Christiania. Dey say it vill be tere at ten, but I tink it is only shtories."

It was not. Already we were well up in the smoothness and shelter of the beautiful Christiania Fjord,—a great bay, which is in the beginning like a sea looking southward into an ocean; then reaches up northward, counting its miles by scores, shooting its shining inlets to right and left, narrowing and yielding itself more and more to the embrace of the land, till, suddenly, headed off by a knot of hills, it turns around, and as if seeking the outer sea it has left behind runs due south for miles, making the peninsula of Nesodden. On this peninsula is the little town of Drobak, where thirty thousand pounds' worth of ice is stored every winter, to be sold in London as "Wenham Lake ice." This ice was in summer the water of countless little lakes. The region round about the Christiania Fjord is set full of them, lily-grown and fir-shaded. Once they freeze over, they are marked for their destiny; the snow is kept from them; if the surface be too much roughened it is planed; then it is lined off into great squares, cut out by an ice plough, pried up by wedges, loaded on carts, and carried to the ice-houses. There it is packed into solid bulk, with layers of sawdust between to prevent the blocks from freezing together again.

The fjord was so glassy smooth, as we sailed up, that even the "Jupiter" could not roll, but glided; and seemed to try to hush its jarring sounds, as if holding its breath, with sense of the shame it was to disturb such sunny silence. The shores on either hand were darkly wooded; here and there a country-seat on higher ground, with a gay flag floating out. No Norwegian house is complete without its flagstaff. On Sundays, on all holidays, on the birthdays of members of the family, and on all days when guests are expected at the house, the flag is run up. This pretty custom gives a festal air to all places, since one can never walk far without coming on a house that keeps either a birthday or a guest-day.

There seemed almost a mirage on the western shore of the bay. The captain, noticing this, called my attention to it, and said it was often to be seen on the Norway fjords, "but it was always on the head." In reply to my puzzled look, he went on to say, by way of making it perfectly clear, that "the mountains stood always on their heads;" that is, "their heads down to the heads of the other mountains." He then spoke of the strange looming of the water-line often seen in Holland, where he had travelled; but where, he said he never wished to go again, they were "such dirty people." This accusation brought against the Dutch was indeed startling. I exclaimed in surprise, saying that the world gave the Dutch credit for being the cleanliest of people. Yes, he said, they did scrub; it was to be admitted that they kept their houses clean; "but they do put the spitkin on the table when they eat."

"Spitkin," cried I. "What is that? You do not mean spittoon, surely?"

"Yes, yes, that is it; the spitkin in which to spit. It is high, like what we keep to put flowers in,—so high," holding his hand about twelve inches from the table; "made just like what we put for flowers; and they put it always on the table when they are eating. I have myself seen it. And they do eat and spit, and eat and spit, ugh!" And the captain shook himself with a great shudder, as well he might, at the recollection. "I do never wish to see Holland again."

I took the opportunity then to praise the Norwegian spitkin, which is a most ingenious device; and not only ingenious, but wholesome and cleanly. It is an open brass pan, some four inches in depth, filled with broken twigs of green juniper. These are put in fresh and clean every day,—an invention, no doubt, of poverty in the first place; for the Norwegian has been hard pressed for centuries, and has learned to set his fragrant juniper and fir boughs to all manner of uses unknown in other countries; for instance, spreading them down for outside door-mats, in country-houses,—another pretty and cleanly custom. But the juniper-filled spitkin is the triumph of them all, and he would be a benefactor who would introduce its civilization into all countries. The captain seemed pleased with my commendation, and said hesitatingly,—

"There is a tale, that. They do say,—excuse me," bowing apologetically,—"they do say that it is in America spitted everywhere; and that an American who was in Norway did see the spitkin on the stove, but did not know it was spitkin."

This part of the story I could most easily credit, having myself looked wonderingly for several days at the pretty little oval brass pan, filled with juniper twigs, standing on the hearth of the turret-like stove in my Bergen bedroom, and having finally come to the conclusion that the juniper twigs must be kept there for kindlings.

"So he did spit everywhere on the stove; it was all around spitted. And when the servant came in he said, 'Take away that thing with green stuff; I want to spit in that place.'"

The captain told this story with much hesitancy of manner and repeated "excuse me's;" but he was reassured by my hearty laughter, and my confession that my own ignorance of the proper use of the juniper spitkin had been quite equal to my countryman's.

Christiania looks well, as one approaches it by water; it is snugged in on the lower half of an amphitheatre of high wooded hills, which open as they recede, showing ravines, and suggesting countless delightful ways up and out into the country. Many ships lie in the harbor; on either hand are wooded peninsulas and islands; and everywhere are to be seen light or bright-colored country-houses. The first expression of the city itself, as one enters it, is disappointingly modern, if one has his head full of Haralds and Olafs, and expects to see some traces of the old Osloe. The Christiania of to-day is new, as newness is reckoned in Norway, for it dates back only to the middle of the sixteenth century; but it is as characteristically Norwegian as if it were older,—a pleasanter place to stay in than Bergen, and a much better starting-point for Norway travel.

"A cautious guest,

When he comes to his hostel,

Speaketh but little;

With his ears he listeneth,

With his eyes he looketh:

Thus the wise learneth,"

an old Norwegian song says.

When walking through the labyrinths of the Victoria Hotel in Christiania, and listening with my ears, I heard dripping and plashing water, and when, looking with my eyes, I saw long dark corridors, damp courtyards, and rooms on which no sun ever had shone, I spoke little, but forthwith drove away in search of airier, sunnier, drier quarters. There were many mysterious inside balconies of beautiful gay flowers at the Victoria, but they did not redeem it.

"I tink dat place is like a prison more tan it is like a hÓtle," said Katrina, as we drove away; in which she was quite right. "I don't see vhy tey need make a hÓtle like dat; nobody vould stay in prison!" At the Hotel Scandinavie, a big room with six sides and five windows pleased her better. "Dis is vat you like," she said; "here tere is light."

Light! If there had only been darkness! In the Norway summer one comes actually to yearn for a little Christian darkness to go to bed by; much as he may crave a stronger sun by day, to keep him warm, he would like to have a reasonable night-time for sleeping. At first there is a stimulus, and a weird sort of triumphant sense of outwitting Nature, in finding one's self able to read or to write by the sun's light till nearly midnight of the clock. But presently it becomes clear that the outwitting is on the other side. What avails it that there is light enough for one to write by at ten o'clock at night, if he is tired out, does not want to write, and longs for nothing but to go to sleep? If it were dark, and he longed to write, nothing would be easier than to light candles and write all night, if he chose and could pay for his candles. But neither money nor ingenuity can compass for him a normal darkness to sleep in. The Norwegian house is one-half window: in their long winters they need all the sun they can get; not an outside blind, not an inside shutter, not a dark shade, to be seen; streaming, flooding, radiating in and round about the rooms, comes the light, welcome or unwelcome, early and late. And to the words "early" and "late" there are in a Norway summer new meanings: the early light of the summer morning sets in about half-past two; the late light of the summer evening fades into a luminous twilight about eleven. Enjoyment of this species of perpetual day soon comes to an end. After the traveller has written home to everybody once by broad daylight at ten o'clock, the fun of the thing is over: normal sleepiness begins to hunger for its rights, and dissatisfaction takes the place of wondering amusement. This dissatisfaction reaches its climax in a few days; then, if he is wise, the traveller provides himself with several pieces of dark green cambric, which he pins up at his windows at bedtime, thereby making it possible to get seven or eight hours' rest for his tired eyes. But the green cambric will not shut out sounds: and he is lucky if he is not kept awake until one or two o'clock every night by the unceasing tread and loud chatter of the cheerful Norwegians, who have been forced to form the habit of sitting up half their night-time to get in the course of a year their full quota of daytime.

"I tink King Ring lived not far from dis place," said Katrina, stretching her head out of first one and then another of the five windows, and looking up and down the busy streets; "not in Christiania, but I tink not very far away. Did ever you hear of King Ring? Oh, dat is our best story in all Norway,—te saga of King Ring!"

"Cannot you tell it to me, Katrina?" said I, trying to speak as if I had never heard of King Ring.

"Vell, King Ring, he loved Ingeborg. I cannot tell; I do not remember. My father, you see,—not my right father, but my father the hatter, he whose little home I showed you in Bergen,—he used to take books out vere you pay so much for one week, you see; and I only get half an hour, maybe, or few minutes, but I steal de book, and read all vat I can. I vas only little den: oh, it is years ago. But it is our best story in all Norway. Ingeborg was beauty, you see, and all in te kings' families vat vanted her: many ghentlemens, and Ring, he killed three or four I tink; and den after he killed dem three or four, den he lost her, after all, don't you see; and tat was te fun of it."

"But I don't think that was funny at all, Katrina," I said. "I don't believe King Ring thought it so."

"No, I don't tink, either; but den, you see, he had all killed for nothing, and den he lost her himself. I tink it was on the ice: it broke. A stranger told dem not to take the ice; but King Ring, he would go. I tink dat was te way it was."

It was plain that Katrina's reminiscences of her stolen childish readings of the Frithiof's Saga were incorrect as well as fragmentary, but her eager enthusiasm over it was delicious. Her face kindled as she repeated, "Oh, it is our best story in all Norway!" and when I told her that the next day she should go to a circulating library and get a copy of the book and read it to me, her eyes actually flashed with pleasure.

Early the next morning she set off. A nondescript roving commission she bore: "A copy of the Frithiof's Saga in Norwegian, [how guiltily I feared she might stumble upon it in an English translation!] and anything in the way of fruit or vegetables." These were her instructions. It was an hour before she came back, flushed with victory, sure of her success and of my satisfaction. She burst into the room, brandishing in one hand two turnips and a carrot; in the other she hugged up in front of her a newspaper, bursting and red-stained, full of fresh raspberries; under her left arm, held very tight, a little old copy of the Frithiof's Saga. Breathless, she dropped the raspberries down, newspaper and all, in a rolling pile on the table, exclaiming, "I tink I shall not get tese home, after I get te oders in my oder hand! Are tese what you like?" holding the turnips and carrot close up to my face. "I vas asking for oranges," she continued, "but it is one month ago since they leaved Christiania."

"What!" I exclaimed.

"One mont ago since dey were to see in Christiania," she repeated impatiently. "It is not mont since I vas eating dem in Bergen. I tought in a great place like Christiania dere would be more tings as in Bergen; but it is all shtories, you see."

How well I came to know the look of that little ragged old copy of the grand Saga, and of Katrina's face, as she bent puzzling over it, every now and then bursting out with some ejaculated bit of translation, beginning always with, "Vell, you see!" I kept her hard at work at it, reading it to me, while I lingered over my lonely breakfasts and dinners, or while we sat under fragrant fir-trees on country hills. Wherever we went, the little old book and Katrina's Norwegian and English Dictionary, older still, went with us.

Her English always incalculably wrong and right, in startling alternations, became a thousand times droller when she set herself to deliberate renderings of the lines of the Saga. She went often, in one bound, in a single stanza, from the extreme of nonsense to the climax of poetical beauty of phrase; her pronunciation, always as unexpected and irregular as her construction of phrases, grew less and less correct, as she grew excited and absorbed in the tale. The troublesome th sound, which in ordinary conversation she managed to enunciate in perhaps one time out of ten, disappeared entirely from her poetry; and in place of it, came the most refreshing t's and d's. The worse her pronunciation and the more broken her English, the better I liked it, and the more poetical was the translation. Many men have tried their hand at translation of the Frithiof's Saga, but I have read none which gave me so much pleasure as I had from hearing Katrina's; neither do I believe that any poet has studied and rewritten it, however cultured he might be, with more enthusiasm and delight than this Norwegian girl of the people, to whom many of the mythological allusions were as unintelligible as if they had been written in Sanskrit. She had a convenient way of disposing of those when she came to such as she did not understand: "Dat's some o' dem old gods, you see,—dem gods vat dey used to worship." It was evident from many of Katrina's terms of expression, and from her peculiar delight in the most poetical lines and thoughts in the Saga, that she herself was of a highly poetical temperament. I was more and more impressed by this, and began at last to marvel at the fineness of her appreciations. But I was not prepared for her turning the tables suddenly upon me, as she did one day, after I had helped her to a few phrases in a stanza over which she had come to a halt in difficulties.

"As sure 's I'm aliv," she exclaimed, "I believe you're a poet your own self, too!" While I was considering what reply to make to this charge, she went on: "Dat's what tey call me in my own country. I can make songs. I make a many: all te birtdays and all te extra days in our family, all come to me and say, 'Now, Katrina, you has to make song.' Dey tink I can make song in one minute for all! [What a kinship is there, all the world over, in some sorts of misery!] Ven I've went to America, I made a nice song," she added. "I vould like you to see."

"Indeed, I would like very much to see it, Katrina," I replied. "Have you it here?"

"I got it in my head, here," she said, laughing, tapping her broad forehead. "I keeps it in my head."

But it was a long time before I could persuade her to give it to me. She persisted in saying that she could not translate it.

"Surely, Katrina," I said, "it cannot be harder than the Frithiof's Saga, of which you have read me so much."

"Dat is very different," was all I could extract from her. I think that she felt a certain pride in not having her own stanzas fail of true appreciation owing to their being put in broken English. At last, however, I got it. She had been hard at work a whole forenoon in her room with her dictionary and pencil. In the afternoon she came to me, holding several sheets of much-scribbled brown paper in her hand, and said shyly, "Now I can read it." I wrote it down as she read it, only in one or two instances helping her with a word, and here it is:—

SONG ON MY DEPARTURE FROM BERGEN FOR AMERICA.

The time of departure is near,

And I am no more in my home;

But, God, be thou my protector.

I don't know how it will go,

Out on the big ocean,

From my father and mother;

I don't know for sure where at last

My dwelling-place will be on the earth.

My thanks to all my dear,

To my foster father and mother;

In the distant land, as well as the near,

Your word shall be my guide.

It may happen that we never meet on earth,

But my wish is that God forever

Be with you and bless you.

Don't forget; bring my compliments over

To that place where my cradle stood,—

The dear Akrehavnske waves,

What I lately took leave of.

Don't mourn, my father and mother,

It is to my benefit;

My best thanks for all the goodness

You have bestowed on me.

A last farewell to you

All, my dear friends;

May the life's fortune, honor, and glory

Be with you wherever you are!

I know you are all standing

In deep thoughts

When Harald Haarfager weighs anchor,

And I am away from you.

A wreath of memory

I will twine or twist round

My dear native land,

And as a lark happy sing

This my well-meaned song.

Oh, that we all may be

Wreathed with glory,

And in the last carry our wreaths of glory

In heaven's hall!

Watching my face keenly, she read my approbation of her simple little song, and nodding her head with satisfaction, said,—

"Oh, sometime you see I ain't quite that foolish I look to! I got big book of all my songs. Nobody but myself could read dem papers. It is all pulled up, and five six words standing one on top of oder."

II.

Murray's Guide-book, that paradoxical union of the false and the true, says of Christiania, "There is not much of interest in the town, and it may be seen in from four to five hours." The person who made that statement did not have Katrina with him, and perhaps ought therefore to be forgiven. He had not strolled with her through the market square of a morning, and among the old women, squatted low, with half a dozen flat, open baskets of fruit before them: blueberries, currants, raspberries, plums, pears, and all shades, sizes, and flavors of cherries, from the pale and tasteless yellow up to those wine-red and juicy as a grape; the very cherry, it must have been, which made Lucullus think it worth while to carry the tree in triumphal procession into Rome. Queer little wooden boxes set on four low wheels, with a short pole, by which a strong man or woman can draw them, are the distinctive features of out-door trade in the Christiania market-places. A compacter, cheaper device for combining storage, transportation, and exhibition was never hit on. The boxes hold a great deal. They make a good counter; and when there are twenty or thirty of them together, with poles set up at the four corners, a clothes-line fastened from pole to pole and swung full of cheap stuffs of one sort and another, ready-made garments, hats, caps, bonnets, shoes, clothespins, wooden spoons, baskets, and boxes,—the venders sitting behind or among their wares, on firkins bottom side up,—it is a spectacle not to be despised; and when a market-place, filled with such many-colored fluttering merchandise as this, is also flanked by old-clothes stalls which are like nothing except the Ghetto, or Rag Fair in London, it is indeed worth looking at. To have at one's side an alert native, of frugal mind and unsparing tongue, belonging to that class of women who can never see a low-priced article offered for sale without, for the moment, contemplating it as a possible purchase, adds incalculably to the interest of a saunter through such a market. The thrifty Katrina never lost sight of the possibility of lighting upon some bargain of value to her home housekeeping; and our rooms filled up from day to day with her acquisitions. She was absolutely without false pride in the matter of carrying odd burdens. One day she came lugging a big twisted door-mat with, "You see dat? For de door. In Bergen I give exact double." The climax of her purchases was a fine washboard, which she brought in in her arms, and exclaimed, laughing, "What you tink the porter say to me? He ask if I am going to take in washing up here. I only give two crowns for dat," she said, eying it with the fondest exultation, and setting it in a conspicuous place, leaning against the side of the room; "it is better as I get for four in Bergen." Good little Katrina! her hands were too white and pretty to be spoiled by hard rubbing on a washboard. They were her one vanity, and it was pardonable.

"Did you ever see hand like mine?" she said one day, spreading her right hand out on the table. "Dere was two English ladies, dey say it ought to be made in warx, and send to see in Crystal Palace. See dem?" she continued, sticking her left forefinger into the four dimples which marked the spots where knuckles are in ordinary hands; "dem is nice." It was true. The hand was not small, but it was a model: plump, solid, dimples for knuckles, all the fingers straight and shapely; done in "warx," it would have been a beautiful thing, and her pleasure in it was just as guileless as her delight in her washboard.

As she delved deeper in her Frithiof's Saga, she discovered that she had been greatly wrong in her childish impressions of the story. "It was not as I tought," she said: "King Ring did get Ingeborg after; but he had to die, and leaved her."

When we went out to Oscar's Hall, which is a pretty country-seat of the king's, on the beautiful peninsula of LadegaardsÖen, she was far more interested in the sculptured cornice which told the story of Frithiof and Ingeborg, than in any of the more splendid things, or those more suggestive of the life of the king. The rooms are showily decorated: ceilings in white with gold stars, walls panelled with velvet; gay-colored frescos, and throne-like chairs in which "many kings and queens have sat," the old woman who kept the keys said. Everywhere were the royal shields with the crown and the lion; at the corners of the doors, at the crossings of ceiling beams, above brackets, looking-glasses, and on chair-backs.

"I tink the king get tired looking at his crown all de time," remarked Katrina, composedly. "I wonder vere dey could put in one more."

The bronze statues of some of the old kings pleased her better. She studied them carefully: Olaf and Harald Haarfager, Sverre Sigurdson and Olaf Tryggvesson; they stand leaning upon their spears, as if on guard. The face of Harald looks true to the record of him: a fair-haired, blue-eyed man, who stopped at nothing when he wanted his way, and was just as ready to fall in love with six successive women after he had labored hard twelve years for Gyda, and won her, as before.

"He is de nicest," said Katrina, lingering before his statue, and reaching up and fingering the bronze curiously. "Ain't it wonderful how dey can make such tings!" she added with a deep-drawn sigh. But when I pointed to the cornice, and said, "Katrina, I think that must be the story of the Frithiof's Saga," she bounded, and threw her head back, like a deer snuffing the wind. "Ja, ja," cried the old woman, evidently pleased that I recognized it, and then she began to pour out the tale. Is there a peasant in all Norway that does not know it, I wonder? The first medallion was of the children, Frithiof and Ingeborg, playing together. "Dere," said Katrina, "dat is vat I told you. Two trees growed in one place, nicely in the garden; one growed with de strongth of de oak, dat was Frithiof; and de rose in the green walley, dat was Ingeborg de beauty."

Very closely she scanned the medallions one after the other, criticising their fidelity to the record. When she came to the one where Frithiof is supporting King Ring on his knee, fainting, or sleeping, she exclaimed, "Dere, if he had been dat bad, he could have killed King Ring den, ven he was sleeping; but see, he have thrown his sword away;" and at last, when the sculpture represented King Ring dying, and bequeathing his beautiful queen and her children to Frithiof, she exclaimed, "Dere, dem two boys belongs to King Ring; but now Frithiof gets her. Dat is good, after all dat dem two had gone through with."

King Oscar makes very little use of this pretty country-house. He comes there sometimes once or twice in the course of a summer, for a day, or part of a day, but never to sleep, the old woman said. All the rest of the time it is empty and desolate, with only this one poor old woman to keep it tidy; a good berth for her, but a pity that nobody should be taking comfort all summer in the superb outlooks and off-looks from its windows and porch, and in the shady walks along the banks of the fjord. One of the old Norway kings, Hakon, thought the peninsula beautiful enough for a wedding morning gift to his queen; but it seems not to have been held so dear by her as it ought, for she gave it away to the monks who lived on the neighboring island of HovedÖen. Then, in the time of the Reformation, when monks had to scatter and go begging, and monastic properties were lying about loose everywhere, the Norwegian kings picked up LadegaardsÖen again, and it has been a crown property ever since.

One of the most charming of the short drives in what Katrina called "the nearance" of Christiania is to the "Grefsens Bad," a water-cure establishment only two miles away, by road, to the north, but lying so much higher up than the town that it seems to lie in another world,—as in fact it does; for, climbing there, one rises to another and so different air that he becomes another man, being born again through his lungs. It is a good pull up a stony and ill-kept road, to reach the place; but it is more than worth while, for the sake of the clear look-out to sea, over a delicious foreground of vivid green fields and woods.

"This is the place where all the sick peoples in Norway do come when de doctors cannot do nottings more for dem," said Katrina; "den dey comes here. Here came our last king, King Oscar, and den he did die on the dock ven he vas coming away. He had all de climb dis hill vor notting. Ven it is the time, one has to go, no matter how much money dey will pay; dere is One"—here she stopped hesitating for a word—"you know all vat I mean: dere is One what has it all his own way, not de way we wish it shall be." This she said devoutly, and was silent for an unwonted length of time afterwards.

As we were driving down the steepest part of the hill, a man came running after us, calling so loudly to us to stop that we were alarmed, thinking something must be wrong with our carriage or in the road. Not at all. He was a roadside merchant; not precisely a pedler, since he never went out of his own town, but a kind of aristocratic vender in a small circuit, it seemed; we saw him afterwards in other suburbs, bearing with him the same mysterious basket, and I very much fear, poor fellow, the same still more mysterious articles in it. Not even on Norwegian country-roads, I think, could there be found many souls so dead to all sense of beauty as to buy the hideous and costly combinations which he insisted upon laying in my lap: a sofa-cushion, square, thick, and hard, of wine-colored velvet, with a sprawling tree and bird laid upon it in an appliquÉ pattern cut out of black and white velvet; a long and narrow strip of the same velvet, with the same black and white velvet foliage and poultry, was trimmed at the ends with heavy fringe, and intended for a sideboard or a bureau; a large square tablecloth to match completed the list of his extraordinary wares. It was so odd a wayside incident that it seemed to loom quite out of its normal proportions as a mere effort at traffic. He insisted on spreading the articles in my lap. He could not be persuaded to take them away. The driver turning round on his seat, and Katrina leaning over from hers, both rapt in admiration of the monstrosities, were stolidly oblivious of my indifference. The things seemed to grow bigger and bigger each moment, and more and more hideous, and it was at last only by a sudden effort of sternness, as if shaking off a spell, that I succeeded in compelling the man to lift them from my knees and fold them away in his basket. As soon as he had gone, I was seized with misgivings that I had been ungracious; and these misgivings were much heightened by Katrina's soliloquizing as follows:—

"He! I tink he never take dem tings away. His wife are sick; dat is de reason he is on de road instead of her. He was sure you would buy dem."

I hope they are sold. I wish I could know.

The suburbs of Christiania which lie along the road to the Grefsens Bad are ugly, dusty, and unpleasing. "I tink we go some oder way dan way we came," said Katrina. "Dere must be better way." So saying, she stopped the driver abruptly, and after some vigorous conversation he took another road.

"He ask more money to go by St. John's Hill, but I tell him you not pay any more. I can see it is not farther; I ask him if he tink I got eyes in de head," she said scornfully, waving her fat fingers towards the city which lay close at hand.

"Ah, dat is great day," she continued, "St. John's Day. Keep you dat in America? Here it is fires all round, from one hill to one hill. Dat is from de old time. I tink it is from Catolics. Dey did do so much for dem old saints, you see. I tink dat is it; but I tink dey do not just know in Norway to-day what for dey do it. It has been old custom from parents to parents."

Then I told her about Balder and his death, and asked her if she had never seen the country people put a boat on the top of their bonfire on St. John's Eve.

"Yes, I did see dat, once, in Stavanger," she replied, "but it was old boat; no use any more. I tink dat be to save wood. It are cheapest wood dey have, old boat. Dat were not to give to any god."

"No, you are mistaken, Katrina," I said. "They have done that for hundreds of years in Norway. It is to remind them of Balder's great ship, the Hringhorn, and to commemorate his death."

"May be," she said curtly, "but I don't tink. I only see dat once; and all my life I see de fires, all round Bergen, and everywhere, and dere was no boat on dem. I don't tink."

We drove into the city through one of the smaller fruit markets, where, late as it was, the old women still lingered with their baskets of cherries, pears, and currants. They were not losing time, for they were all knitting, fast as their fingers could fly; such a thing as a Norwegian wasting time is not to be seen, I verily believe, from the North Cape to the Skager Rack, and one would think that they knit stockings enough for the whole continent of Europe; old men, old women, little girls, and even little boys, all knitting, knitting, morning, noon, and night, by roadsides, on door-sills, in market-places; wherever they sit down, or stand, to rest, they knit. As our carriage stopped, down went the stockings, balls rolling, yarn tangling, on the sidewalk, and up jumped the old women, all crowding round me, smiling, each holding out a specimen of her fruit for me to taste. "Eat, lady, eat. It is good." "Eat and you will buy." "No such cherries as these in Christiania." "Taste of my plums." A chorus of imploring voices and rattling hail of sks. Hurried and confused talk in the Norwegian tongue as spoken by uneducated people is a bewildering racket; it hardly sounds like human voices. If the smiles did not redeem it, it would be something insupportable; but the smiles do redeem it, transfigure it, lift it up to the level of superior harmonies. Such graciousness of eye and of smiling lips triumphs over all possible discord of sound, even over the Norwegian battery of consonants.

Katrina fired back to them all. I fear she reproved them; for they subsided suddenly into silence, and left the outstretched withered palms holding the fruit to speak for themselves.

"I only tell dem you cannot buy all de market out. You can say vat you like," she said.

Pears and cherries, and plums too, because the old plum-woman looked poorer than the rest, I bought; and as we drove away the chorus followed us again with good wishes. "Dey are like crazy old vomans," remarked Katrina; "I never heard such noise of old vomans to once time before." A few minutes after we reached the house she disappeared suddenly, and presently returned with a little cantaloupe melon in her hands. Standing before me, with a curious and hesitating look on her face, she said, "Is dis vat you like?"

"Oh, yes," I exclaimed, grateful for the sight. "I was longing for one yesterday. Where did you get it?"

"I not get it. I borrow it for you to see. I tell the man I bring it back," she replied, still with the same curious expressions of doubt flitting over her queer little face.

"Why, whose melon is it?" I exclaimed. "What did you bring it for if it were not for sale?"

"Oh, it is for selled, if you like to buy," she said, still with the hesitant expression.

"Of course I like to buy it," I said impatiently. "How much does it cost?"

"Dat is it," replied Katrina, sententiously. "It is too dear to buy, I tell the man; but he said I should bring it to you, to see. I tink you vill not buy it;" still with the quizzical look on her face.

Quite out of patience, I cried, "But why don't you tell me the price of it? I should like it very much. It can't be so very dear."

"Dat it can," answered Katrina, chuckling, at last letting out her suppressed laugh. "He ask six kroner for dat ting; and I tink you not buy it at such price, so I bring to make you laugh."

One dollar and sixty-two cents for a tiny cantaloupe! Katrina had her reward. "Oh, but I am dat glad ven I make you laugh," she said roguishly, picking up her melon, as I cried out with surprise and amusement,—

"I should think not. I never heard of such a price for a melon."

"So I tink," said Katrina. "I ask de man who buy dem melons, and he say plenty peoples; but I tink it is all shtories." And she ran downstairs laughing so that I heard her, all the way, two flights down to the door.

High up on the dark wooded mountain wall which lies to the north and northwest of Christiania is a spot of light color. In the early morning it is vivid green; sometimes at sunset it catches a tint of gold; but neither at morn nor at night can it ever be overlooked. It is a perpetual lure to the eye, and stimulus to the imagination. What eyry is it that has cleared for itself this loop-hole in the solid mountain-forest? Is it a clearing, or only a bit of varied wooding of a contrasting color to the rest? For several days I looked at it before I asked; and I had grown so impressed by its mystery and charm, that when I found it was a house, the summer home of a rich Christiania family, and one of the places always shown to travellers, I felt more than half-way minded not to go near it,—to keep it still nothing more than a far-away, changing, luring oasis of sunny gold or wistful green on the mountain-side. Had it been called by any other name, my instinct to leave it unknown might have triumphed; but the words "Frogner SÆter" were almost as great a lure to the imagination as the green oasis itself. The sÆter, high up on some mountain-side, is the fulfilling of the Norwegian out-door life, the key-note of the Norwegian summer. The gentle kine know it as well as their mistresses who go thither with them. Three months in the upper air, in the spicy and fragrant woods,—no matter if it be solitary and if the work be hard, the sÆter life must be the best the Norwegians know,—must elevate and develop them, and strengthen them for their long, sunless winters. I had looked up from the Vossevangen Valley, from Ringeriket, and from the Hardanger country to many such gleaming points of lighter green, tossed up as it were on the billowy forests. They were beyond the reach of any methods of ascent at my command; unwillingly I had accepted again and again the wisdom of the farm people, who said "the road up to the sÆter was too hard for those who were not used to it." Reluctantly I had put the sÆter out of my hopes, as a thing to be known only by imagination and other people's descriptions. Therefore the name of the Frogner SÆter was a lure not to be resisted; a sÆter to which one might drive in a comfortable carriage over a good road could not be the ideal sÆter of the wild country life, but still it was called "sÆter;" we would go, and we would take a day for the going and coming.

"Dat will be bestest," said Katrina. "I tink you like dat high place better as Christiania."

On the way we called at the office of a homoeopathic physician, whose name had been given to me by a Bergen friend. He spoke no English, and for the first time Katrina's failed. I saw at once that she did not convey my meanings to him, nor his to me, with accuracy. She was out of her depth. Her mortification was droll; it reached the climax when it came to the word "dynamic." Poor little child! How should she have known that!

"I vill understand! I vill!" she exclaimed; and the good-natured doctor took pains to explain to her at some length; at the end of his explanation she turned to me triumphantly, with a nod: "Now I know very well; it is another kind of strongth from the strongth of a machine. It is not such strongth that you can see, or you can make with your hands; but it is strongth all the same,"—a definition which might be commended to the careful attention of all persons in the habit or need of using the word "dynamic."

It is five miles from Christiania out and up to the Frogner SÆter, first through pretty suburban streets which are more roads than streets, with picturesque wooden houses, painted in wonderful colors,—lilac, apple-green, white with orange-colored settings to doors and windows, yellow pine left its own color, oiled, and decorated with white or with maroon red. They look like the gay toy-houses sold in boxes for children to play with. There is no one of them, perhaps, which one would not grow very weary of, if he had to see it every day, but the effect of the succession of them along the roadside is surprisingly gay and picturesque. Their variety of shape and the pretty little balconies of carved lattice-work add much to this picturesqueness. They are all surrounded by flower-gardens of a simple kind,—old-fashioned flowers growing in clumps and straight borders, and every window-sill full of plants in bloom; windows all opening outward like doors, so that in a warm day, when every window-sash is thrown open, the houses have a strange look of being a-flutter. There is no expression of elegance or of the habits or standards of great wealth about these suburban houses of Christiania; but there is a very rare and charming expression of comfort and good cheer, and a childlike simplicity which dotes on flowers and has not outgrown the love of bright colors. I do not know anywhere a region where houses are so instantly and good-naturedly attractive, with a suggestion of good fellowship, and sensible, easy-going good times inside and out.

The last three miles of the road to the sÆter are steadily up, and all the way through dense woods of fir and spruce,—that grand Norway spruce, which spreads its boughs out generously as palms, and loads down each twig so full that by their own weight of shining green the lower branches trail out along the ground, and the upper ones fold a little and slant downwards from the middle, as if avalanches of snow had just slid off on each side and bent them. Here were great beds of ferns, clusters of bluebells, and territories of LinnÆa. In June the mountain-side must be fragrant with its flowers.

Katrina glowed with pleasure. In her colder, barrener home she had seen no such lavishness as this.

"Oh, but ven one tinks, how Nature is wonderful!" she cried. "Here all dese tings grow up, demselves! noting to be done. Are dey not wort more dan in gardens? In gardens always must be put in a corn before anyting come up; and all dese nice tings come up alone, demselves."

"Oh, but see vat God has done; how much better than all vat people can; no matter vat dey make."

Half-way up the mountain we came to a tiny house, set in a clearing barely big enough to hold the house and let a little sun in on it from above.

"Oh, I wish-shed I had dat little house!" she exclaimed. "Dat house could stand in Bergen. I like to carry dat home and dem trees to it; but my husband, he would not like it. He likes Bergen house bestest."

As we drew near the top, we met carriages coming down. Evidently it was the custom to drive to the Frogner SÆter.

"I tink in dat first carriage were Chews," said Katrina, scornfully. "I do hate dem Chews. I can't bear dat kind of people."

"Why not, Katrina?" I asked. "It is not fair to hate people because of their religion."

"Oh, dat I don't know about deir religion," she replied carelessly. "I don't tink dey got much religion anyhow. I tink dey are kind of thieves. I saw it in New York. Ven I went into Chew shop, he say a ting are tree dollar; and I say, 'No, dat are too dear.' Den he say, 'You can have for two dollar;' and I say, 'No, I cannot take;' and den he say, 'Oh, have it for one dollar and half;' and I tink all such tings are not real. I hate dem Chews. Dey are all de same in all places. Dey are chust like dat if dey come in Norway. Very few Chews comes in Norway. Dat is one good ting."

In a small open, part clearing, part natural rocky crest of the hill, stood the sÆter: great spaces of pink heather to right and left of it, a fir wood walling it on two sides; to the south and the east, a clear off-look over the two bays of the Christiania Fjord, past all their islands, out to sea, and the farthest horizon. Christiania lay like an insignificant huddle of buildings in the nearer foreground; its only beauty now being in its rich surrounding of farm-lands, which seemed to hold it like a rough brown pebble in an emerald setting.

The house itself fronted south. Its piazza and front windows commanded this grand view. It was of pine logs, smoothed and mortised into each other at the corners. Behind it was a hollow square of the farm buildings: sheds, barns, and the pretty white cottage of the overseer. The overseer's wife came running to meet us, and with cordial good-will took us into the house, and showed us every room. She had the pride of a retainer in the place; and when she found that none of its beauty was lost on me, she warmed and grew communicative. It will not be easy to describe the charm of this log-house: only logs inside as well as out; but the logs are Norway pine, yellow and hard and shining, taking a polish for floors and ceiling as fine as ash or maple, and making for the walls belts and stripes of gold color better than paper; all cross beams and partitions are mortised at the joinings, instead of crossing and lapping. This alone gives to these Norwegian houses an expression quite unlike that of ordinary log-houses. A little carved work of a simple pattern, at the cornices of the rooms and on the ceiling beams, was the only ornamentation of the house; and a great glass door, of a single pane, opening on the piazza, was the only luxurious thing about it. Everything else was simply and beautifully picturesque. Old Norwegian tapestries hung here and there on the walls, their vivid reds and blues coming out superbly on the yellow pine; curious antique corner cupboards, painted in chaotic colors of fantastic brightness; old fireplaces built out into the room, in the style of the most ancient Norwegian farm-houses; old brasses, sconces, placques, and candlesticks; and a long dining-table, with wooden benches of hollowed planks for seats, such as are to be seen to-day in some of the old ruined baronial castles in England.

In the second-story rooms were old-fashioned bedsteads: one of carved pine, so high that it needed a step-ladder to mount it; the other built like a cupboard against the wall, and shut by two sliding doors, which on being pushed back disclosed two narrow bunks. This is the style of bed in many of the Norwegian farm-houses still. On the sliding door of the upper bunk was a small photograph of the prince imperial; and the woman told us with great pride that he had slept one night in that bed.

Upstairs again, by narrow winding stairs, and there we found the whole floor left undivided save by the big chimney-stack which came up in the middle; the gable ends of the garret opened out in two great doors like barn-doors; under the eaves, the whole length of each side, was a row of bunk beds, five on each side, separated only by a board partition. This was a great common bedroom, "used for gentlemen at Christmas-time," the woman said. "There had as many as fifteen or twenty gentlemen slept in that room."

At Christmas, it seems, it is the habit of the family owning this unique and charming country-house to come up into the woods for a two weeks' festivity. The snow is deep. The mercury is well down near zero or below; but the road up the mountain is swept level smooth: sledges can go easier in winter than carriages can in summer; and the vast outlook over the glittering white land and shining blue sea full of ice islands must be grander than when the islands and the land are green. Pine logs in huge fireplaces can warm any room; and persons of the sort that would think of spending Christmas in a fir-wood on a mountain-top could make a house warm even better than pine logs could do it. Christmas at the Frogner SÆter must be a Christmas worth having.

"The house is as full as ever it can hold," said the woman, "and fifty sit down to dinner sometimes; they think nothing of driving up from Christiania and down again at midnight."

What a place for sleigh-bells to ring on a frosty night; that rocky hill-crest swung out as it were in clear space of upper air, with the great Christiania Fjord stretching away beneath, an ice-bound, ice-flaked sea, white and steel-black under the winter moon! I fancied the house blazing like a many-sided beacon out of the darkness of the mountain front at midnight, the bells clanging, the voices of lovers and loved chiming, and laughter and mirth ringing. I think for years to come the picture will be so vivid in my mind that I shall find myself on many a Christmas night mentally listening to the swift bells chiming down the mountain from the Frogner SÆter.

The eastern end of the piazza is closed in by a great window, one single pane of glass like the door; so that in this corner, sheltered from the wind, but losing nothing of the view, one can sit in even cold weather. Katrina cuddled herself down like a kitten, in the sun, on the piazza steps, and looking up at me, as I sat in this sheltered corner, said approvingly,—

"Dis you like. I ask de voman if we could stay here; but she got no room: else she would like to keep us. I tink I stay here all my life: only for my husband, I go back."

Then she pulled out the Saga and read some pages of Ingeborg's Lament, convulsing me in the beginning by saying that it was "Ingeborg's Whale." It was long before I grasped that she meant "Wail."

"What you say ven it is like as if you cry, but you do not cry?" she said. "Dat is it. It stands in my dictionary, whale!" And she reiterated it with some impatience at my stupidity in not better understanding my own language. When I explained to her the vast difference between "whale" and "wail," she was convulsed in her turn. "Oh, dere are so many words in English which do have same sound and mean so different ting," she said, "I tink I never learn to speak English in dis world."

While we were sitting there, a great speckled woodpecker flew out from the depths of the wood, lighted on a fir near the house, and began racing up and down the tree, tapping the bark with his strong bill, like the strokes of a hammer.

"There is your Gertrude bird, Katrina," said I. She looked bewildered. "The woman that Christ punished," I said, "and turned her into the Gertrude bird; do you not know the old story?" No, she had never heard it. She listened with wide-open eyes while I told her the old Norwegian legend, which it was strange that I knew and she did not,—how Christ and Peter, stopping one day at the door of a woman who was kneading her bread, asked her for a piece. She broke a piece for them; but as she was rolling it out, it grew under her roller till it filled her table. She laid it aside, saying it was too large, broke off another piece, rolled it out with the same result; it grew larger every moment. She laid that aside, and took a third bit, the smallest she could possibly break off: the same result; that too grew under her roller till it covered the table. Then her heart was entirely hardened, and she laid this third piece on one side, saying, "Go your ways, I cannot spare you any bread to-day." Then Christ was angry, and opened her eyes to see who he was. She fell on her knees, and implored his forgiveness; but he said, "No. You shall henceforth seek your bread from day to day, between the wood and the bark." And he changed her into a bird,—the Gertrude bird, or woodpecker. The legend runs, however, that, relenting, the Lord said that when the plumage of the bird should become entirely black, her punishment should be at an end. The Gertrude bird grows darker and darker every year, and when it is old, has no white to be seen in its plumage. When the white has all disappeared, then the Lord Christ takes it for his own, so the legend says; and no Norwegian will ever injure a Gertrude bird, because he believes it to be under God's protection, doing this penance.

"Is dat true?" asked Katrina, seriously. "Dat must have been when de Lord was going about on dis earth; ven he was ghost. I never hear dat."

I tried to explain to her the idea of a fable.

"Fable," she said, "fable,—dat is to teach people to be giving ven dey got, and not send peoples away vidout notings. Dat's what I see, many times I see. But I do not see dat de peoples dat is all for saving all dey got, gets any richer. I tink if you give all the time to dem dat is poorer, dat is de way to be richer. Dere is always some vat is poorer."

In the cosey little sitting-room of her white cottage, the farmer's wife gave us a lunch which would not have been any shame to any lady's table,—scrambled eggs, bread, rusks, milk, and a queer sort of election cake, with raisins but no sugar. This Katrina eyed with the greed of a child; watched to see if I liked it, and exclaimed, "We only get dat once a year, at Christmas time." Seeing that I left a large piece on my plate, she finally said, "Do you tink it would be shame if I take dat home? It is too good to be leaved." With great glee, on my first word of permission, she crammed it into her omnivorous pocket, which already held a dozen or more green apples that she had persisted in picking up by the roadside as we came.

As we drove down the mountain, the glimpses here and there, between the trees, of the fjord and islands were even more beautiful than the great panorama seen from the top. Little children ran out to open gates for us, and made their pretty Norwegian courtesies, with smiles of gratitude for a penny. We met scores of peasant women going out to their homes, bearing all sorts of burdens swung from a yoke laid across their shoulders. The thing that a Norwegian cannot contrive to swing from one side or the other of his shoulder-yoke must be very big indeed. The yokes seem equally adapted to everything, from a butter-firkin to a silk handkerchief full of cabbages. Weights which would be far too heavy to carry in any other way the peasants take in this, and trot along between their swinging loads at as round a pace as if they had nothing to carry. We drove a roundabout way to our hotel, to enable Katrina to see an old teacher of hers; through street after street of monotonous stucco-walled houses, each with a big open door, a covered way leading into a court behind, and glimpses of clothes-lines, or other walls and doorways, or green yards, beyond. Two thirds of the houses in Christiania are on this plan; the families live in flats, or parts of flats. Sometimes there are eight or ten brass bell-handles, one above another, on the side of one of these big doorways, each door-bell marking a family. The teacher lived in a respectable but plain house of this kind,—she and her sister; they had taught Katrina in Bergen when she was a child, and she retained a warm and grateful memory of them; one had been married, and her husband was in America, where they were both going to join him soon. Everywhere in Norway one meets people whose hearts are in America,—sons, husbands, daughters, lovers. Everybody would go if it were possible; once fourteen thousand went in one year, I was told. These poor women had been working hard to support themselves by teaching and by embroidering. Katrina brought down, to exhibit to me, a dog's head, embroidered in the finest possible silks,—silks that made a hair-stroke like a fine pen; it was a marvellously ingenious thing, but no more interesting than the "Lord's Prayer written in the circumference of two inches," or any of that class of marvels.

"Dey take dese to America," Katrina said. "Did you ever see anyting like dem dere? Dey get thirty kroner for one of dem dogs. It is chust like live dog."

After we returned, Katrina disappeared again on one of her mysterious expeditions, whose returns were usually of great interest to me. This time they brought to both of us disappointment. Coming in with a radiant face, and the usual little newspaper bundle in her hand, she cried out, "Now I got you de bestest ting yet," and held out her treasures,—a pint of small berries, a little larger than whortleberries, and as black and shining as jet. "Dis is de bestest berry in all Norway," she exclaimed, whipping one into her own mouth; "see if you like."

I incautiously took three or four at once. Not since the days of old-fashioned Dover's and James's powders have I ever tasted a more nauseous combination of flavors than resided in those glittering black berries.

"You not like dem berries?" cried poor Katrina, in dismay at my disgust, raising her voice and its inflections at every syllable. "You not like dem berries? I never hear of nobody not liking dem berries. Dey is bestest we got! Any way, I eat dem myself," she added philosophically, and retreated crestfallen to her room, where I heard her smacking her lips over them for half an hour. I believe she ate the whole at a sitting. They must have been a variety of black currant, and exclusively intended by Nature for medicinal purposes; but Katrina came out hearty and well as ever the next day, after having swallowed some twelve or sixteen ounces of them.

By way of atoning for her mishap with the berries, she ran out early the next morning and bought a little packet of odds and ends of strong-scented leaves and dust of several kinds, and, coming up behind my chair, held it close under my nose, with,—

"Ain't dat nice smell? Ain't dat better as dem berries? Oh, I tink I never stop laughing ven I am at home ven I tink how you eat dem berries. Dey are de bestest berries we got."

On my approving the scent, she seemed much pleased, and laid the little packet on my table, remarking that I could "chust smell it ven I liked." She added that in the winter-time they kept it in all Norwegian houses, and strewed it on the stoves when they were hot, and it "smelled beautiful." They called it "king's smoke," she said, and nobody would be without it.

It is easy to see why the Norwegians, from the king down, must need some such device as this to make tolerable the air in their stove-heated rooms in winter. It was appalling to look at their four and five storied stoves, and think how scorched the air must be by such a mass of heated iron. The average Norwegian stove is as high as the door of the room, or even higher. It is built up of sections of square-cornered hollow iron pipe, somewhat as we build card-houses; back and forth, forward and back, up and across, through these hollow blocks of cast-iron, goes the heated air. It takes hours to get the tower heated from bottom to top; but once it is heated there is a radiating mass of burnt iron, with which it must be terrible to be shut up. The open spaces between the cross sections must be very convenient for many purposes,—to keep all sorts of things hot; and a man given to the habit of tipping back in his chair, and liking to sit with his feet higher than his head, could keep his favorite attitude and warm his feet at the same time,—a thing that couldn't be done with any other sort of stove.

One of my last days in Christiania was spent on the island of HovedÖen, a short half-hour's row from the town. Here are the ruins of an old monastery, dating back to the first half of the twelfth century, and of priceless interest to antiquarians, who tell, inch by inch, among the old grass-grown stones, just where the abbot sat, and the monks prayed, and through which arch they walked at vespers. Bits of the old carved cornices are standing everywhere, leaning up against the moss-grown walls, which look much less old for being hoary with moss. One thing they had in the monastery of HovedÖen,—a well of ice-cold, sparkling water, which might have consoled them for much lack of wine; and if the limes and poplars and birches were half as beautiful in 1147 as they are now, the monks were to be envied, when a whole nunneryful of nuns took refuge on their island in the time of the first onslaught on convents. What strolls under those trees! There are several species of flowers growing there now which grow nowhere else in all the region about, and tradition says that these nuns planted them. The paths are edged with heather and thyme and bluebells, and that daintiest of little vetches, the golden yellow, whose blossoms were well named by the devout sisters "Mary's golden shoes." As we rowed home at sunset over the amber and silver water, Katrina sang Norwegian songs; her voice, though untrained and shrill, had sweet notes in it, and she sang with the same childlike heartiness and innocent exultation that she showed in everything else. "Old Norway" was the refrain of the song she liked most and sang best; and more than one manly Norwegian voice joined in with hers with good-will and fervor.

At the botanical gardens a Victoria regia was on the point of blooming. Day after day I had driven out there to see it; each day confident, each day disappointed. The professor, a quaint and learned old man, simple in speech and behavior, as all great scientific men are, glided about in a linen coat, his shears hanging in a big sheath on one side his belt, his pruning-knife on the other, and a big note-book in his breast-pocket. His life seemed to me one of the few ideal ones I had ever seen. His house stands on a high terrace in the garden, looking southward, over the city to the fjord. It is a long, low cottage, with dormer windows sunk deep in the red-tiled roof, shaded by two great horsechestnut trees, which are so old that clumps of grass have grown in their gnarled knots. Here he plants and watches and studies; triumphs over the utmost rigors of the Norway climate, and points with pride to a dozen varieties of Indian corn thriving in his grounds. Tropical plants of all climes he has cajoled or coerced into living out-of-doors all winter in Norway. One large house full of begonias was his special pride; tier after tier of the splendid velvet leaves, all shades of color in the blossoms: one could not have dreamed that the world held so many varieties of begonia. He was annoyed by his Victoria regia's tardiness. There it lay, lolling in its huge lake,—in a sultry heated air which it was almost dangerous for human lungs to breathe. Its seven huge leaves spread out in round disks on which a child could stand safe. In the middle, just out of the water, rose the mysterious red bud. It was a plant he had himself raised in one year from seed; and he felt towards it as to a child.

"I cannot promise. I did think it should have opened this morning. It has lifted itself one inch since last night," he said. "It is not my fault," he added apologetically, like a parent who cannot make a child obey. Then he showed me, by his clasped hands, how it opened; in a series of spasmodic unclosings, as if by throes, at intervals of five or six minutes; each unclosing revealing more and more of the petals, till at last, at the end of a half-hour, the whole snowy blossom is unfolded: one day open, then towards night, by a similar series of throe-like movements, it closes, and the next morning, between nine and eleven, opens again in the same way, but no longer white. In the night it has changed its color. One look, one taste, one day, of life has flushed it rose-red. As the old professor told me this tale, not new, but always wonderful and solemn, his face kindled with delight and awe. No astronomer reckoning the times and colors of a recurring planet could have had a vivider sense of the beauty and grandeur of its law. The last thing I did in Christiania was to drive for the third time to see if this flower had unfolded. It had apparently made no movement for twenty-four hours.

"I tought you not see dat flower," said Katrina, who had looked with some impatience on the repeated bootless journeys. "I tink it is hoombug. I tink it is all shtories."

To me there was a half-omen in the flower's delay. Norway also had shown me only half its beauty; I was going away wistful and unsatisfied. "You must have another Victoria next summer," I said to the quaint old professor, when I bade him good-by; and as Katrina ran swiftly off the deck of the steamer, that I might not see any tears in her eyes, bidding me farewell, I said also to her, "Next summer, Katrina. Study the Frithiof's Saga, and read me the rest of it next summer."

I hope she will not study it so well as to improve too much in her renderings. Could any good English be so good as this?

FRITHIOF AND INGEBORG.

Two trees growed bold and silent: never before the north never seen such beauties; they growed nicely in the garden.

The one growed up with the strongth of the oak; and the stem was as the handle of the spear, but the crown shaked in the wind like the top on the helmet.

But the other one growed like a rose,—like a rose when the winter just is going away; but the spring what stands in its buds still in dreams childly is smiling.

The storm shall go round the world. In fight with the storm the oak will stand: the sun in the spring will glow on the heaven. Then the rose opens its ripe lips.

So they growed in joy and play; and Frithiof was the young oak, but the rose in the green walley was named Ingeborg the Beauty.

If you seen dem two in the daylight, you would think of Freya's dwelling, where many a little pair is swinging with yellow hair, and vings like roses.

But if you saw dem in the moonlight, dancing easy around, you would tink to see an erl-king pair dancing among the wreaths of the walley. How he was glad—

"Dem's the nicest vairses, I tink."

"Ven he had been fighting that way, you see, without any sword or anyting."

"Veil, dat's the mans; vat's the vomens?"

"Goddesses?"

"Vell, dat's it."

"Vat's a big field called when it is all over ripe?"

"Yellow?"

"No,"—a shake of the head.

"Ain't there a word you say spinned?"

"He cut all round. Wherever he come, he cut them two."

Here we had a long halt, Katrina insisting on saying "smaragd," and declaring that that was an English word; she had seen it often, and "it could not be pronounced in any other way;" she had seen it in "Lady Montaig in Turkey,"—"she had loads of smaragds and all such things." Her contrition, when she discovered her mistake, was inimitable.

She had read this account of "Lady Montagu in Turkey," in her "Hundred Lessons," at school so many times she knew it by heart, which she proceeded to prove by long quotations.

"He have to leave because he vas poor, you see."

"He was fader of all dem oder gods, you see."

"Look now, all dese be strange words."

This is her translation of the last stanzas of the account of Ingeborg's marriage to Frithiof:—

A few days before I left Christiania, Katrina had come shyly up to my table, one evening, and tossed down on it a paper, saying,—

"Dere is anoder. Dis one is for you."

On looking at it, I found it contained four stanzas of Norwegian verse, in which my name occurred often. No persuasions I could bring to bear on her would induce her to translate it. She only laughed, said she could not, and that some of my Norwegian friends must read it to me. She read it aloud in the Norwegian, and to my ignorant ear the lines had a rhythmical and musical sound. She herself was pleased with it. "It is nice song, dat song," she said; but turn it into English for me she would not. Each day, however, she asked if I had had it translated, and finding on the last day that I had not, she darted into her room, shut the door, and in the course of two hours came out, saying, "I got it part done; but dey tell you better, as I tell you."

The truth was, the tribute was so flattering, she preferred it should come to me second hand. She shrank from saying directly, in open speech, all that it had pleased her affectionate heart to say in the verses. Three of the stanzas I give exactly as she wrote them. The rest is a secret between Katrina and me.

THANKS.

The last verse seems to me to sound far better in Norwegian than in English, and is it not more fitting to end the Katrina Saga in a few of her words in her own tongue?

ENCYCLICALS OF A TRAVELLER.

I.

Dear People,—We had a fine send-off from Christiania. The landlord of the Scandinavie sent up to know if we would do him the honor to drive down to the steamer in his private carriage. Katrina delivered the message with exultant eyes. "You see," she said, "he likes to show dat he do not every day get such in de house." We sent word back that we should consider ourselves most honored; and so when we went downstairs, there stood a fine landau open, with bouquets lying on the seats, and a driver in livery; and the landlord himself in the doorway, and the landlord's wife, who had sent us the bouquets, Katrina said, peering from behind the curtains. When she saw Katrina pointing her out, she threw the curtains back and appeared full in view, smiling and waving her hand; we lifted up our bouquets, and waved them to her, and smiled our thanks. Katrina sprang up, with my cloak on her arm, to the coachman's seat. "I tink I go down too," she exclaimed, "I see you all safe;" and so we drove off, with as much smiling and bowing and "fare-welling" as if we had been cousins and aunts of everybody in the Scandinavie. How we did hate to leave our great corner rooms, with five windows in them, the fifth window being across the corner, which is not a right-angled corner, but like a huge bay-window! This utilization of the corner is a very noticeable feature in the streets of Christiania. In the greater part of the best houses the corner is cut off in this way; the door into the room being across the opposite corner (also cut off), thus making a six-sided room. The improvement in the street-fronts of handsome blocks of buildings made by this shape instead of the usual rectangular corner is greater than would be supposed, and the rooms made in this fashion are delightfully bright, airy, and out of the common.

I did not quite fancy sailing in a steamer named "Balder,"—one gets superstitious in Norway,—but I think we had flowers enough on board to have saved us if Loki herself had wished us ill. Nothing in all Norway is more striking than the Norwegian's love of flowers. It is no exaggeration to say that one does not see a house without flowers in the window. In the better houses every window in the front, even up to the little four-paned window in the gable, has its row of flower-pots; and even in the very poorest hovels there will be at least one window flower-filled. This general love and culture of flowers makes it the most natural thing in the world for the Norwegian, when he travels, to be carrying along something in the shape of a plant. He is either taking it home or carrying it as a gift to some one he is going to visit. I have not yet been on a steamboat where I did not see at least a dozen potted plants, of one sort or another, being carefully carried along, as hand luggage, by men or women; and as for bouquets, they are almost as common as hats and bonnets. Of the potted plants, five out of seven will be green myrtles, and usually the narrow leaf. There is a reason for this,—the Norwegian bride, of the better class, wears always a chaplet of green myrtle, and has her white veil trimmed with little knots of it from top to bottom. The chaplet is made in front somewhat after the shape of the high gilded crowns worn by the peasant brides; but at the back it is simply a narrow wreath confining the veil. After I knew this, I looked with more interest at the pots of myrtle I met everywhere, journeying about from place to place; and I observed, after this, what I had not before noticed, that every house had at least one pot of myrtle in its windows.

There were a dozen different varieties of carnations in our bouquets. The first thing I saw as we moved off from the wharf was a shabbily dressed little girl with a big bouquet entirely of carnations, in which there must have been many more. In a few minutes a woman, still shabbier than the little girl, came down into the cabin with a great wooden box of the sort that Norwegian women carry everything in, from potatoes up to their church fineries: it is an oval box with a little peak at each end like a squirrel cage; the top, which has a hole in the middle, fits down around these peaks so tight that the box is safely lifted by this handle; and, as I say, everything that a Norwegian woman wants to carry, she puts into her tine (pronounced, "teener"). Some of them are painted in gay colors; others are left plain. Setting down the box, she opened it, and proceeded to sprinkle with water one of the most beautiful wreaths I have ever seen,—white lilies, roses, and green myrtle. I think it came from a wedding; but as she knew no English, and I no Norwegian, I could not find out. Two nights and a day she was going to carry it, however, and she sprinkled it several times a day. An hour later, when I went down into the cabin, there was a row of bouquets filling the table under the looking-glass; five pots of flowers standing on the floor, and in several staterooms whose doors were standing open I saw still more of both bouquets and plants. This is only a common illustration of the universal custom. It is a beautiful one, and in thorough keeping with the affectionate simplicity of the Norwegian character.

Christiania looked beautiful as we sailed away. It lies in the hollow, or rather on the shore rim of the fine amphitheatre of hills which makes the head of the Christiania Fjord. Fjord is a much more picturesque word than bay; and I suppose when a bay travels up into the heart of a country scores of miles, slips under several narrow strips of land one after the other, making lakes between them, it is entitled to be called something more than plain bay; but I wish it had been a word easier to pronounce. I never could say "fjord," when I read the word in America; and all that I have gained on the pronouncing of it by coming to Norway is to become still more distinctly aware that I always pronounce it wrong. I do not think Cadmus ever intended that j should be y, or that one should be called on to pronounce f before it.

The Christiania Fjord has nothing of grandeur about it, like the wilder fjords on the west coast of Norway. It is smiling and gracious, with beautifully rounded and interlocking hills,—intervals of pine woods, with green meadows and fields, pretty villages and hamlets, farm-houses and country-seats, and islands unnumbered, which deceive the eye continually, seeming to be themselves the shore. We left Christiania at two o'clock; at that hour the light on a Norway summer day is like high noon in other parts of the world,—in fact, it's noon till four o'clock in the afternoon, and then it is afternoon till ten, and then a good, long, very light twilight to go to bed by at eleven or twelve, and if you want to get up again at three o'clock in the morning you can wake without any trouble, for it is broad daylight: all of which is funny for once or twice, or perhaps for ten times, but not for very long.

It was not till four or five o'clock that we began to see the full beauty of the fjord; then the sun had gone far enough over to cast a shadow,—soften all the forest tops on the west side, and cast shadows on the east side. The little oases of bright green farm-lands, with their clusters of houses, seemed to sink deeper and deeper into their dark pine-tree settings,—the fjord grew wider and wider, and was as smooth as a lake: now and then we drew up by a little village and half stopped,—it seemed no more than that,—and somebody would climb on or off the steamer by little cockles of boats that bobbed alongside. Sometimes we came to a full stop, and lay several minutes at a wharf, loading or unloading bags of grain. I think we took on just as many as we took off,—like a game of bean-bags between the villages. The sailors carried them off and on their backs, one set standing still in their places to lift the bags up on their comrades' backs; they lifted with a will, and then folded their arms and waited till the bag-carriers came back to be loaded up again. If I could have spoken Norwegian, I should have asked whether those sets of men took turn and turn about, or whether one set always lifted up the loads and the others lugged them,—probably the latter. That's the way it is in life; but I never saw a more striking example of it than in the picture these sailors made standing with folded arms doing nothing, waiting till their fellows came back again to be loaded down like beasts of burden. It was at "Moss" we saw this,—a pretty name for a little town with a handful of gay-colored houses, red, yellow, and white, set in green fields and woods. Women came on board here with trays of apples and pears to sell,—little wizened pears red high up on one side, like some old spinsters' cheeks in New England. Children came too, with cherries tied up in bunches of about ten to a bunch; they looked dear, but it was only a few hundredths of a quarter of a dollar that they cost. Since I have found out that a kroner is only about twenty-seven cents, and that it takes one hundred ore to make a kroner, all the things that cost only a few ore seem to me so ridiculously cheap as not to be worth talking about. These children with the cherries were all barefoot, and they were so shy that they curled and mauled their little brown toes all the time they were selling their cherries, just as children one shade less shy twist and untwist their fingers.

We left Moss by a short cut, not overland exactly, but next door to it,—through land. The first thing we knew we were sailing through a bridge right into the town, in a narrow canal,—we could have thrown an apple into the windows of some of the houses as we glided by; then in a few moments out we were again into the broad open fjord.

At six o'clock we went down to our first Danish supper. The "Balder" is a Danish boat, and sailed by a Danish captain, and conducted on Danish methods; and they pleased us greatly. The ordinary Norwegian supper is a mongrel meal of nobody knows how many kinds of sausage, raw ham, raw smoked salmon, sardines, and all varieties of cheese. The Danish we found much better, having the addition of hot fish, and cutlets, and the delicious Danish butter. One good result of Denmark's lying low, she gets splendid pasturage for her cows, and makes a delicious butter, which brings the highest prices in the English and other markets.

When we came up from supper we found ourselves in a vast open sea; dim shores to be seen in the east and west,—in the east pink and gray, in the west dark with woods. The setting sun was sinking behind them, and its yellow light etched every tree-top on the clear sky. Here and there a sail gleamed in the sun, or stood out white in the farther horizon. A pink halo slowly spread around the whole outer circumference of the water; and while we were looking at this, all of a sudden we were not in an open sea at all, but in among islands again, and slowly coming to a stop between two stretches of lovely shore,—big solid green fields like America's on one side, and a low promontory of mossy rocks on the other. A handful of houses, with one large and conspicuous one in the centre, stood between the green fields and the shore. A sign was printed on this house in big letters; and as I was trying to spell it out, a polite Norwegian at my elbow said, "Shoddy factory! We make shoddy there; we call it so after the English," bowing flatteringly as if it were a compliment to the English. Kradsuld is Norwegian for shoddy, and sounds worlds more respectable, I am sure.

The roof of this shoddy factory had four dormer windows in it, with their tiled roofs running up full width to the ridge-pole, which gave the roof the drollest expression of being laid in box-plaits. I wish somebody would make a series of photographs of roofs in Norway and Denmark. They are the most picturesque part of the scenery; and as for their "sky-line," it is the very poetry of etching. I thought I had seen the perfection of the beauty of irregularity in the sky-line in Edinburgh; but Edinburgh roofs are monotonous and straight in comparison with the huddling of corners and angles in Scandinavian gables and ridges and chimneys and attics. Add to this freaky and fantastic and shifting shape the beauty of color and of fine regularity of small curves in the red tile, and you have got as it were a mid-air world of beauty by itself. As I was studying out the points where these box-plaited dormer windows set into their roof, the same polite Norwegian voice said to a friend by his side, "I have read it over twenty-five ones." He pronounced the word read as for the present indicative, which made his adverbs of time at the end still droller. Really one of the great pleasures of foreign travel is the English one hears spoken; and it is a pleasure for which we no doubt render a full equivalent in turn when we try speaking in any tongue except our own. But it is hard to conceive of any intelligible English French or German being so droll as German or French English can be and yet be perfectly intelligible. Polite creatures that they all are, never to smile when we speak their language!

As the sun sank, the rosy horizon-halo gathered itself up and floated about in pink fleeces; the sky turned pale green, like the sky before dawn. Latitude plays strange pranks with sunsets and sunrises. Norway, I think, must be the only place in the world where you could mistake one for the other; but it is literally true that in Norway it would be very easy to do so if you happened not to know which end of the day it was.

When we went down into our staterooms sorrow awaited us. To the eye the staterooms had been most alluring. One and all, we had exclaimed that never had we seen so fine staterooms in a Norwegian steamboat. All the time we were undressing we eyed with complacency the two fine red sofas, on one of which we were to sleep. Strangely enough, no one of us observed the shape of the sofa, or thought to try the consistency of it. Our experiences, therefore, were nearly simultaneous, and unanimous to a degree, as we discovered afterwards on comparing notes. The first thing we did on lying down on our bed was to roll off it. Then we got up and on again, and tried to get farther back on it. As it was only about the width of a good-sized pocket-handkerchief, and rounded up in the middle, this proved to be impossible. Then we got up and tried to pull it out from the wall. Vain! It was upholstered to the board as immovable as the stack-pipe of the boat. Then we tried once more to adjust ourselves to it. Presently we discovered that it was not only narrow and rounding, but harder than it would have seemed possible that anything in shape of tufted upholstered velvet could be. We began to ache in spots; the ache spread: we ached all over; we could neither toss, twist, nor turn on the summit of this narrow tumulus. Misery set in; indignation and restlessness followed; seasickness, in addition, seemed for once a trifle. The most indefatigable member of the party, being also the most fatigued, succeeded at last in procuring a half-dozen small square pillows,—one shade less hard than the sofa, she thought when she first lay down on them, but long before morning she began to wonder whether they were not even harder. Such a night lingers long in one's memory; it was a closing chapter to our experience of Norwegian beds,—a fitting climax, if anything so small could be properly called a climax. How it has ever come about that the Norwegian notion of a bed should be so restricted, I am at a loss to imagine. They are simply child's cribs,—no more; as short as narrow, and in many instances so narrow that it is impossible to turn over quickly in them without danger. I have again and again been suddenly waked, finding myself just going over the edge. The making of them is as queer as the size. A sort of bulkhead small mattress is slipped in under the head, lifting it up at an angle admirably suited to an asthmatic patient who can't breathe lying down, or to a small boy who likes to coast down-hill in his bed of a morning. The single pillow is placed on this; the short, narrow sheet flung loosely over it; blanket, ditto; coverlet, ditto—it may or may not be straight or smooth. The whole expression of the bed is as if it had been just hastily smoothed up temporarily till there should be time enough to make it. In perfect good faith I sent for a chambermaid one night, in the early days of my Norway journey, and made signs to her that I would like to have my bed made, when the poor thing had already made it to the very best of her ability, and entirely in keeping with the customs of her country.

It is very needless to say that we all were up early the next morning; and there was something ludicrous enough in the tone in which each inquired eagerly of each, "Did you ever know such beds?" At ten we were anchored off the little town of Frederikssund; and here the boat lay five mortal hours, doing nothing but unloading and taking on bags of bran.

Another big steamer was lying alongside, doing the same thing. This was our first glimpse of Denmark. Very flat it looked,—just out of water, and no more,—like Holland. The sailors who were carrying the bags of bran wore queer pointed hoods on their heads, with long, tail-like pieces coming down behind, which made them look like elves,—at least it did for the first hour; after that they no longer looked queer. If we had gone on shore, we could have seen the Royal Estate of Iaegerspriis, which has belonged to kings of Denmark ever since the year 1300, and has a fine park, and a house decorated by sculptures by Wiedewelt,—a Danish sculptor of the last century,—and an old sepulchre which dates back to the stone age, and, best of all, a great old oak, called the King's Oak, which is the largest in Denmark, and dates back farther than anybody will know till it dies. A tree is the only living thing which can keep the secret of its own age, is it not? Nobody can tell within a hundred or two of years anything about it so long as the tree can hold its head up. The circumference of this tree is said to be forty-two feet four feet from the ground,—a pretty respectable tree, considering the size of Denmark itself. Now we begin to see where the old Vikings got the oak to build their ships. They carried it up from Denmark, which must have been in those days a great forest of beech and oak to have kept so many till now. It is only a few miles from Frederikssund, also, to Havelse, which is celebrated for its "kitchen middings,"—the archÆological name for kitchen refuse which got buried up hundreds of years ago. Even potato parings become highly important if you keep them long enough! They will at least establish the fact that somebody ate potatoes at that date; and all things hang together so in this queer world that there is no telling how much any one fact may prove or disprove. For myself, I don't care so much for what they ate in those days as for what they wore,—next to what they did in the way of fighting and making love. I saw the other day, in Christiania, a whole trayful of things which were taken from a burial mound opened in Norway last spring. A Viking had been buried there in his ship. The hull was entire, and I have stood in it; but not even the old blackened hull, nor the oars, stirred me so much as the ornaments he and his horses had worn,—the bosses of the shields, and queer little carved bits of iron and silver which had held the harnesses together; one exquisitely wrought horse's head, only about two inches long, which must have been a beautiful ornament wherever it was placed. If there had been a fish-bone found left from his last dinner or from the funeral feast which the relations had at his wake, I should not have cared half so much for it. But tastes differ.

An afternoon more of sailing and another awful night on the red velvet ridges, and we came to Copenhagen itself, at five of the morning. At four we had thought it must be near,—long strips of green shore, with trees and houses,—so flat that it looked narrow, and seemed to unroll like a ribbon as we sailed by; but when we slipped into the harbor we saw the difference,—wharves and crowds of masts and warehouses, just like any other city, and the same tiresome farce of making believe examine your luggage. I should respect customs and custom-houses more if they did as they say they will do. As it is, to smuggle seems to me the easiest thing in the world as well as the most alluring. I have never smuggled because I have never had the means necessary to do it; but I could have smuggled thousands of dollars worth of goods, if I had had them, through every custom-house I have ever seen. A commissionnaire with a shining beaver hat stood on the shore to meet us, we having been passed on with "recommendations" from the kindly people of the Scandinavie in Christiania to the King of Denmark Hotel people in Copenhagen. Nothing is so comfortable in travelling as to be waited for by your landlord. The difference between arriving unlooked for and arriving as an expected customer is about like the difference between arriving at the house of a friend and arriving at that of an enemy. The commissionaire had that pathetic air of having seen better days which is so universal in his class. One would think that the last vocation in the world which a "decayed" gentleman would choose would be that of showing other gentlemen their way about cities; it is only to be explained by the same morbid liking to be tantalized which makes hungry beggars stand by the hour with their noses against the outside of the panes of a pastry-cook's window,—which they all do, if they can! Spite of our flaming "recommendations," which had preceded us from our last employer, the landlord of the Scandinavie, satisfactory rooms were not awaiting us. Sara Bernhardt was in town, and every hotel was crowded with people who had come for a night or two to see and hear her. It is wonderful how much room a person of her sort can take up in a city; and if they add, as she does, the aroma of a distinct and avowed disreputability, they take up twice as much room! Since her visit to England I wonder she does not add to her open avowal of disregard of all the laws and moralities which decent people hold in esteem, "By permission of the Queen," or "To the Royal Family."

But this is not telling you about Copenhagen. It was five o'clock when we landed, and before seven I had driven with the commissionnaire to each one of the four first-class hotels in Copenhagen in search of sunny rooms. None to be had! All four of the hotels were fully occupied, as I said, by Sara Bernhardt in some shape or other. So we made the best of the best we could do,—breakfasted, slept, lunched, and at two o'clock were ready to begin to see Copenhagen. At first we were disappointed, as in Christiania, by its modern look. It is a dreadful pity that old cities will burn down and be rebuilt, and that all cities must have such a monotony of repetitions of blocks of houses. By the end of another century there won't be an old city left anywhere in the world. There are acres of blocks of houses in Copenhagen to-day that might have been built anywhere else, and fit in anywhere else just as well as here. When you look at them a little more closely, you see that there are bits of terra-cotta work in friezes and pilasters and brackets here and there, which would not have been done anywhere except in the home of Thorwaldsen. If he had done nothing else for art than to stamp a refined and graceful expression on all the minor architectural decorations of his native city, that would have been worth while. There is not an architectural monstrosity in the city,—not one; and many of the buildings have an excellent tone of quiet, conventional decoration which is pleasing to the eye. The brick-work particularly is well done; and simple variations of design are effectively used. You see often recurring over doorways and windows terra-cotta reproductions of some of Thorwaldsen's popular figures; and they are never marred by anything fantastic or bizarre in cornice or moulding above or around them. Among the most noticeable of the modern blocks are some built for the dwellings of poor people. They are in short streets leading to the Reservoir, and having therefore a good sweep of air through them. They are but two stories and a half high, pale yellow brick, neatly finished; and each house has a tiny dooryard filled with flowers. There are three tenements to a house, each having three rooms. The expression of these rows of gay little yellow houses with red roofs and flower-filled dooryards and windows, and each doorway bearing its two or three signs of trade or artisanry, was enough to do one's heart good. The rents are low, bringing the tenements within easy reach of poor people's purses. Yet there is evidently an obligation—a certain sort of social standard—involved in the neighborhood which will keep it always from squalor or untidiness. I doubt if anybody would dare to live in those rows and not have flowers in his front yard and windows. For myself, I would far rather live in one of these little houses than in either of the four great palaces which make the Royal Square, Amalienborg, and look as much like great penitentiaries as like anything else,—high, bulky, unadorned gray piles, flat and straight walls, and tiresome, dingy windows, and the pavements up to their door-sills. They may be splendid the other side the walls,—probably are; but they are dreary objects to look at as you come home of an evening. The horse-cars are the most unique thing in the modern parts of Copenhagen. How two horses can draw them I don't see: but they do; and if two horses can draw two-story horse-cars, why don't we have them in America, and save such overcrowding? The horse-cars here not only have a double row of seats on top as they have in London, but they have a roof over those seats, which nearly doubles the apparent height. As they come towards you they look like a great square-cornered boat, with a long pilot-house on top. Of course they carry just double the number. Women never ride on the top; but men do not mind going upstairs outside a horse-car and sitting in mid-air above the heads of the crowd; and if two horses really are able to draw so many, it is a gain.

The one splendid sight in Copenhagen is its great dragon spire. This, one could stand and gaze at by the day. It is made of four dragons twisted together, heads down, tails up; heads pointing to the four corners of the earth; tails tapering and twisting, and twisting and tapering, till they taper out into an iron rod, which mounts still higher, with three gilded balls, and three wrought gilded circles on it, and finally ends in a huge gilded open-work weather-cock. This is on an old brick building now used as the Exchange. It was built early in 1600 by Christian IV., who seems to me to have done everything best worth doing that was ever done in Denmark. His monogram (Logo) is forever cropping out on all the splendid old things. They are enlarging this Exchange now; and the new red brick and glaring white marble make a very unpleasing contrast to the old part of the building, although every effort has been made to copy the style of it exactly. It is long, and not high, the wall divided into spaces by carved pilasters between every two windows. Each pilaster begins as a man or a woman,—arms cut off at the shoulders, breasts and shoulders looking from a distance grotesquely like four humps. Where the legs should begin, the trunk ends in a great gargoyle,—a lion's head, or a man's, or a bull's,—some grotesque, some beautiful; below this, a conventional tapering support. In the pointed arch of each of the lower windows, also a carved head, no two of them alike, many of them beautiful. It is a grand old building, and one might study it and draw from it by the week. Passing this and crossing an arm of the sea,—which, by the way, you are perpetually doing in Copenhagen to go anywhere, the sea never having fully made up its mind to abandon the situation,—you come to another quaint old building in the suburbs, called Christianshaven. This is Vor Frelser's Church (Our Saviour's Church), built only fifty years later than the Exchange. It is a dark red brick church, with tiny flat dormer windows let in and painted green on a shining tile roof; a square belfry; clock face painted red, black, and blue; above this, a spire, first six-sided and then round, 288 feet high, covered with copper, which is bright green in places, and wound round and round by a glittering gilded staircase, which goes to the very top and ends under a huge gilt ball, under which twelve people can stand. This also is a fine kind of spire to have at hand at sunset; it flames out like a ladder into the sky.

One more old church has a way up, which is worth telling, though you can't see it from the outside. This is another of that same Christian IV.'s buildings,—it was built for an observatory, and used for that for two hundred years, but then joined to a church. The tower is round, 115 feet high, 48 feet in diameter, and made of two hollow cylinders. Between these is the way up, a winding stone road, smooth and broad; and if you'll believe it, in 1716 that rascal Catherine of Russia actually drove up to the top of it in a coach and four, Peter going ahead on horseback. I walked up two of the turns of this stone roadway, and it made me dizzy to think what a clatter the five horses' hoofs must have made, with stone above, below, and around them; and what a place it would have been to have knocked brains out if the horses had been frightened! In this inside cylinder all the University treasures were hidden when the English bombarded the city in 1807, and a very safe place it must have been.

Opposite this church is still another of Christian IV.'s good works,—a large brick building put up for the accommodation of poor students at the University. One hundred poor students still have free lodgings in this building, but part of it looks as if its roof would fall in before long.

Along the arms of the sea which stretch into or across the city—for some of them go way through, come out, and join the outer waters again—are rows of high warehouses for grain, some seven and eight stories high. These have two-storied dormer windows, and terraced roofs, and a great beak like a ship's prow projecting from the ridge-pole of the dormer window. From this the grain is lowered and hoisted to and from the ships below. The ships lie crowded in these narrow arms, as in a harbor, and make picturesque lanes of mast-tops through the city. On many of them are hung great strings of flounders drying, festooned on cords, from rope to rope, scores of them on a single sloop. They look better than they smell; you could not spare them out of the picture.

The last thing we saw this afternoon was the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, which has just been put up in the great garden of Rosenborg Castle. This garden is generally called Kongen's Have ("The King's Garden"). It was planned by the good Christian, but contains now very little of his original design. Two splendid avenues of horse-chestnut trees and a couple of old bronze lions are all that is left as he saw it. It is a great place of resort for the middle classes with their children. A yearly tax of two kroners (about fifty cents) permits a family to take its children there every day; and I am sure there must have been two hundred children in sight as I walked up the dark dense shaded avenue of linden trees at the upper end of which sits the beloved Hans Christian, with the sunlight falling on his head. "The children come here every day," said the commissionnaire; "and that is the reason they put him here, so they can see him." He looked as if he also saw them. A more benignant, lifelike, tender look was never wrought in bronze. He sits, half wrapped in a cloak, his left hand holding a book carelessly on his knee, the right hand lifted as if in benediction of the children. The statue is raised a few feet on a plain pedestal, in a large oval bed of flowers: on one side the pedestal is carved the "Child and the Stork;" on the other, the group of ducks, with the "ugly" one in the middle,—pictures that every little child will understand and love to see; on the front is his name and a wreath of the bay he so well earned. Written above is,—

"PUT UP BY THE DANISH PEOPLE;"

and I thought as I stood there that he was more to be envied than Christian IV. with his splendors of art and architecture, or than the whole Danish dynasty, with their priceless treasures and their jewelled orders. And so ended our first day in Copenhagen.

The next morning, Sunday, I drove out to church in the island of Amager, of which that paradoxical compound of truth and falsehood, Murray, says: "It offers absolutely nothing of interest." I always find it very safe to go to places of which that is said. Amager is Copenhagen's vegetable garden. It is an island four miles square, and absolutely flat,—as flat as a piece of pasteboard; in fact, while I was driving on it, it seemed to me to bear the same relation to flatness that the Irishman's gun did to recoiling,—"If it recoiled at all, it recoiled forrards,"—so it was a very safe gun. If Amager is anything more or less than flat, it is bent inwards; for actually when I looked off to the water it seemed to be higher than the land, and the ships looked as if they might any minute come sailing down among the cabbages. Early in the sixteenth century it was filled up by Dutch people; and there they are to this day, wearing the same clothes and raising cabbages just as they did three hundred years ago. To reach Amager from Copenhagen, you cross several arms of the sea and go through one or two suburbs called by different names; but you would never know that you were not driving in Copenhagen all the time until you come out into the greenery of Amager itself. It was good luck to go of a Sunday. All the Dutch dames were out and about in their best, driving in carts and walking, or sitting in their doorways. The women were "sights to behold." The poorer ones wore shirred sunbonnets on their heads, made of calico, coming out like an old poke-bonnet in front, and with full capes which set out at a fly-away angle behind. They seemed to have got the conception of the cape from the arms of their own windmills (of which, by the way, there are several on the island; and their revolving arms add to the island's expression of being insecurely at sea!). Next below the sunbonnet came a gay handkerchief crossed on the breast, over a black gown with tight sleeves; a full bright blue apron, reaching half-way round the waist and coming down to within two inches of the bottom of the overskirt, completed their rig. It was droller than it sounds. Some of them wore three-cornered handkerchiefs pinned outside their poke-bonnets, pinned under their chins, and the point falling over the neck behind. These were sometimes plain colors, sometimes white, embroidered or trimmed with lace. The men looked exactly like any countrymen in England or Scotland or America. If we haven't an international anything else, we have very nearly an international costume for the masculine human creature; and it is as ugly and unpicturesque a thing as malignity itself could devise. The better class of women wore a plain black bonnet, made in the same poke shape as the sunbonnets, but without any cape at all on the back, only a little full crown tucked in, and the fronts coming round very narrow in the back of the neck, and tied there with narrow black ribbons. Don't fancy these were the only strings that held the roof in its place,—not at all. Two very broad strings, of bright blue, or red, or purple, as it might be, came from somewhere high up inside the front, and tied under the chin in a huge bow, so that their faces looked as if they had first been tied up in broad ribbon for the toothache, and then the huge bonnet put on outside of all. Strangely enough, the effect on the faces was not ugly. Old faces were sheltered and softened, double chins and scraggy necks were hid, and younger faces peered out prettily from under the scoop and among the folds of ribbon; and the absolute plainness of the bonnet itself, having no trimming save a straight band across the middle, gave the charm of simplicity to the outline, and vindicated the worth of that most emphatically when set side by side in the church pews with the modern bonnets,—all bunches and bows, and angles and tilts of feathers and flowers and rubbish generally.

The houses were all comfortable, and some of them very pretty. Low, long, chiefly of a light yellow straw, latticed off by dark lines of wood-work, some of them entirely matted with ivy, like cottages in the English lake district, all of them with either red-tiled or thatched roofs, and the greater part surrounded by hedges. The thatched roofs were delightful. The thatch is held on and fastened down at the ridge-pole by long bits of crooked wood, one on each side, the two crossing and lapping at the ridge-pole and held together there by pins. The effect of a long, low roof set thick with these cross-pieces at the top is almost as if dozens of slender fishes were set there with forked tails up in the air; and when half a dozen sparrows are flitting and alighting on these projecting points of board, the effect is of a still odder trimming. Some of the red-tiled roofs have a set pattern in white painted along the ridge-pole, corners, and eaves. These are very gay; and some of the thatched roofs are grown thick with a dark olive-green moss, which in a cross sunlight is as fine a color as was ever wrought into an old tapestry, and looks more like ancient velvet.

The church in Amager is new, brick, and ugly of exterior. But the inside is good; the wood-work, choir, pulpit, sounding-board, railings, pews, all carved in a simple conventional pattern, and painted dark-olive brown, relieved by claret and green,—in a combination borrowed no doubt from some old wood-work centuries back. In the centre a candelabra, hanging by a red cord, marked off by six gilded balls at intervals; the candelabra itself being simply a great gilded ball, with the simplest possible candle-holders projecting from it. Two high candle-holders inside the railing had each three brass candlesticks in the shape of a bird, with his long tail curled under his feet to stand on,—a fantastic design, but singularly graceful, considering its absurdity. The minister wore a long black gown and high, full ruff, exactly like those we see in the pictures of the divines of the Reformation times. He had a fine and serious face, of oval contour; therefore the ruff suited him. On short necks and below round faces it is simply grotesque, and no more dignified than a turkey-cock's ruffled feathers. He preached with great fervor and warmth of manner; but as I could not understand a word he said, I should have found the sermon long if I had not been very busy in studying the bonnets and faces, and choir of little girls in the gallery. More than half the congregation were in the ordinary modern dress, and would have passed unnoticed anywhere. All the men looked like well-to-do New England farmers, coloring and all; for the blue-eyed, fair-haired type prevails. But the women who had had the sense and sensibility to stick to their own national clothes were as pretty as pictures, as their faces showed above the dark olive-brown pews, framed in their front porches of bonnets,—for that is really what they are like, the faces are so far back in them. Some were lined with bright lavender satin, full-puffed; some with purple; some with blue. The strings never matched the lining, but were of a violent contrast,—light blue in the purple, gay plaid in the lavender, and so on. The aprons were all of the same shade of vivid blue,—as blue as the sky, and darker. They were all shirred down about two inches below the waist; some of them trimmed down the sides at the back with lace or velvet, but none of them on the bottom. One old woman who sat in front of me wore a conical and pointed cap of black velvet and plush, held on her head by broad gray silk strings, tied with a big bow under her chin, covering her ears and cheeks. The cap was shaped like a funnel carried out to a point, which projected far behind her, stiff and rigid; yet it was not an ungraceful thing on the head. These, I am told, are rarely seen now.

When the sermon was done, the minister disappeared for a moment, and came back in gorgeous claret velvet and white robes, with a great gilt cross on his back. The candles on the altar were lighted, and the sacrament was administered to a dozen or more kneeling outside the railing. This part of the ceremony seemed to me not very Lutheran; but I suppose that is precisely the thing it was,—Luther-an,—one of the relics he kept when he threw overboard the rest of the superstitions. Before this ceremony the sexton came and unlocked the pew we occupied, and I discovered for the first time that I and the commissionnaire had been all that time locked in. After church the sexton told us that there would be a baptismal service there in an hour,—eleven babies to be baptized. That was something not to be lost; so I drove away for half an hour, went to a farm-house and begged milk, and then, after I had got my inch, asked for my habitual ell,—that is, to see the house. The woman was, like all housekeepers, full of apologies, but showed me her five rooms with good-will,—five in a row, all opening together, the kitchen in the middle, and the front door in the back yard by the hen-coop and water-barrel! The kitchen was like the Norwegian farm-house kitchens,—a bare shed-like place, with a table, and wall-shelves, and a great stone platform with a funnel roof overhead; sunken hollows to make the fire in; no oven, no lids, no arrangement for doing anything except boiling or frying. A huge kettle of boiling porridge was standing over a few blazing sticks. Havremels grod—which is Norwegian, and Danish also, for oatmeal pudding—is half their living. All the bread they have they buy at the baker's.

The other rooms were clean. Every one had in it a two-storied bed curtained with calico, neat corner cupboards, and bureaus. There were prints on the wall, and a splendid brass coffee-pot and urn under pink mosquito netting. But the woman herself had no stockings on her feet, and her wooden shoes stood just outside the door.

When we reached the church again, the babies were all there. A wail as of bleating lambs reached us at the very door. A strange custom in Denmark explained this bleating: the poor babies were in the hands of godmothers, and not their own mothers. The mothers do not go with their babies to the christening; the fathers, godfathers, and godmothers go,—two godmothers and one godfather to each baby. The women and the babies sat together, and rocked and trotted and shook and dandled and screamed, in a perfect Babel of motion and sound. Seven out of those eleven babies were crying at the top of their lungs. The twenty-two godmothers looked as if they would go crazy. Never, no, never, did I see or hear such a scene! The twenty-two fathers and godfathers sat together on the other side of the aisle, stolid and unconcerned. I tried to read in their faces which men owned the babies, but I could not. They all looked alike indifferent to the racket. Presently the sexton marshalled the women with their babies in a row outside the outer railing. He had in his hand a paper with the list of the poor little things' names on it, which he took round, and called the roll, apparently so as to make sure all was right. Then the minister came in, and went the round, saying something over each baby and making the sign of the cross on its head and breast. I thought he was through when he had once been round doing this; but no,—he had to begin back again at the first baby and sprinkle them. Oh, how the poor little things did scream! I think all eleven were crying by this time, and I couldn't stand it; so at the third baby I signed to my commissionnaire that we would go, and we slipped out as quietly as we could. "Will there be much more of the service?" I asked him. "Oh, yes," he said. "He will preach now to the fathers and to the godfathers and godmothers." I doubt if the godmothers knew one word he said. The babies all wore little round woollen hoods, most of them bright blue, with three white buttons in a row on the back. Their dresses were white, but short; and each baby had a long white apron on to make a show with in front. This was as long as a handsome infant's robe would be made anywhere; but it was undisguisedly an apron, open all the way behind, and in the case of these poor little screaming creatures flying in all directions at every kick and writhing struggle. I was glad enough to escape the church; but twenty-two women must have come out gladder still a little later. On the way home I passed a windmill which I could have stayed a day to paint if I had been an artist. It was six-sided; the sails were on red beams; a red balcony all round it, with red beams sloping down as supports, resting on the lower story; the first story was on piles, and the spaces between filled up solid with sticks of wood,—the place where they kept their winter fuel. Next to this came a narrow belt painted light yellow; then a black belt, with windows in it rimmed with white; then the red balcony; then a drab or gray space,—this made of plain boards; then the rest to the top shingled like a roof; in this part one window, with red rims in each side. A long, low warehouse of light yellow stuccoed walls, lined off with dark brown, joined the mill by a covered way; and the mill-owner's house was close on the other side, also with light yellow stuccoed walls and a red-tiled roof, and hedges and vines and an orchard in front. Paint this, somebody; do!

This is the tale of the first two days in Copenhagen. In my next I will tell you about the museums if I come out of them alive; it sounds as if nobody could. One ought to be here at least two weeks to really study the superb collections of one sort and another.

I will close this first section of my notions of Denmark with a brief tribute to the Danish flea. I considered myself proof against fleas. I had wintered them in Rome, had lived familiarly with them in Norway, and my contempt for them was in direct proportion to my familiarity. I defied them by day, and ignored them by night. But the Danish flea is as David to Saul! He is a cross between a bedbug and a wasp. He is the original of the famous idea of the Dragon, symbolized in all the worships of the world. I bow before him in terror, and trust most devoutly he never leaves the shores of Denmark.

Good-by. Bless you all!

II.

Dear People,—I promised to tell you about the museums in Copenhagen. It was a very rash promise: and there was a rash promise which I made to myself back of that,—that is, to see the Copenhagen museums. I had looked forward to them as the chief interest of our visit; they are said to be among the finest in the world, in some respects unequalled. One would suppose that the Dane's first desire and impulse would be to make it easy for strangers to see these unrivalled collections, the pride of his capital; on the contrary, he has done, it would seem, all that lay in his power to make it quite out of the power of travellers to do anything like justice to them. To really see the three great museums of Copenhagen—the Ethnographic, the Museum of Northern Antiquities, and the Rosenborg Castle collection—one would need to stay in Copenhagen at least two weeks, and even then he would have had but fourteen hours for each museum.

The Ethnographic is open only on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, and open only two hours at a time,—on Sunday, from twelve to two; on the week days, from ten to twelve. There are in this museum over thirty large rooms, and nearly six hundred cases of labelled and numbered objects. All the rooms are of great interest; one could easily spend the whole two hours of the allotted time in any one of them. To attempt even to walk through the whole museum in the two hours is undertaking too much.

The Museum of Northern Antiquities is open on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, from twelve to two; on Tuesdays, from five to seven. On Sundays, you see, it is at the same hour as the Ethnographic! In this museum are eighteen large rooms filled with objects of the greatest interest, from the old "dust heaps" of the lake dwellers down to Tycho Brahe's watch.

The Rosenborg Castle Collection is probably, to travellers in general, the most interesting of all the collections. It is called a "Chronological Collection of the Kings of Denmark,"—which, being interpreted, means that it is a collection of dresses, weapons, ornaments, etc., the greater proportion of which have belonged to Danish kings, from the old days of Christian IV. (1448) down to the present time. These are most admirably arranged in chronological order, so that you see in each room or division a graphic picture of the royal life and luxury of that period. The whole of the great Rosenborg Castle, three floors, is devoted to this collection. How many rooms there are, I do not know,—certainly twenty; and there is not one of them in which I would not like to spend a half-day. Now, how do you think the Danish Government (for this is a national property) arranges for the exhibition of this collection? You may see it, on any day, by applying for a ticket the day beforehand; the hour at which you can be admitted will be marked on your ticket; you will arrive, with perhaps twelve others (that being the outside number for whom tickets are issued for any one hour); you will be walked through that whole museum in one hour, by one of the Government Inspectors of the museum; he will give you a rapid enumeration of the chief objects of interest as you pass; and you will have no clearer idea of any one thing than if you had been fired through the rooms out of a cannon.

Have I spoken unjustly when I say that the Dane appears to have done all in his power to shut up from the general public of travellers these choicest collections of his country?

Now I will tell you all I know of the Rosenborg Collection, and how it happens that I know anything; and my history begins like so many of the old Danish histories, with a fight.

In the outset I paid for a full ticket, as there happened to be no one else who had applied to go in that afternoon. Later, two Englishmen wishing to see the museum, their commissionnaire came to know if I would not like to have them go at the same time, which would reduce the price of the tickets by two thirds. This I declined to do, preferring to have the entire time of the Museum Inspector for my own benefit in way of explanations, etc. With the guide all to myself, I thought I should be able far better to understand and study the museum.

Equipped with my note-book and pen and catalogue, and with the faithful Harriet by my side, I entered, cheerful, confident, and full of enthusiasm, especially about any and all relics of the famous old Christian IV., whose impress on his city and country is so noticeable to this day.

The first scene of my drama opens with the arrival of the Inspector whose duty it was on that occasion to exhibit the museum. There are three of these Inspectors, who take turns in the exhibition. He was a singularly handsome man,—a keen blue eye; hair about white, whiter than it should have been by age, for he could not have been more than fifty or fifty-five; a finely cut face, with great mobility, almost a passionateness of vivacity in its expression; a tall and graceful figure: his whole look and bearing gave me a great and sudden pleasure as he approached. And when he began to speak in English, my delight was kindled anew; I warmed at once in anticipation of my afternoon. Mistaken dream!

I said to him, "I am very sorry, indeed, that we have so short a time in which to see these beautiful and interesting collections. Two hours is nothing."

"Oh, I shall explain to you everything," he said hastily, and proceeded to throw open the doors of mysterious wall-closets in the room which was called the Presence Chamber of Christian IV.

The walls of this room are of solid oak, divided off into panels by beautiful carved pillars, with paintings between. The ceiling is like the walls, and the floor is of marble. In the south wall are four closets filled with more rare and exquisite things than I could describe in a hundred pages; all these in one side of the first room! The first thing which my noble Dane pointed out was the famous old Oldenborg horn, of which I had before read, and wished much to see,—an old drinking-horn of silver, solid chased, from brim to tip. The legend is that it was given to Count Otto of Oldenborg by a mountain nymph in a forest one day in the year 909.

As he pointed out this horn, I opened my catalogue to find the place where it was mentioned there, that I might make on the margin some notes of points which I wished to recollect. I think I might have been looking for this perhaps half of a minute, possibly one whole minute, when thundering from the mouth of my splendid Dane came, "Do you prefer that you read it in the catalogue than that I tell you?"

I am not sure, but my impression is that I actually jumped at his tone. I know I was frightened enough to do so. I then explained to him that I was not looking for it in the catalogue to read then and there, only to associate what I saw with its place and with the illustrations in the catalogue, and to make notes for future use. He hardly heard a word I said. Putting out his hand and waving my poor catalogue away, he said, "It is all there. You shall find everything there, as I tell you; will you listen?"

Quite cowed, I tried to listen; but I found that unless I carried out my plan of following his explanations by the list in the catalogue, and made little marginal notes, I should remember nothing; moreover, that it was impossible to look at half the things, as he rapidly enumerated them. I opened my catalogue again, and began to note some of the more interesting things. The very sight of the catalogue open in my hands seemed to act upon him like a scarlet flag on a bull. Instantly he burst out upon me again; and when I attempted to explain, he interrupted me,—did not give me time to finish one sentence,—did not apparently comprehend what I meant, or what it was that I wished to do, except that it reflected in some way on him as a guide and explainer. In vain I tried to stem the tide of his angry words; and the angrier he got, the less intelligible became his English.

"Perhaps you take me for a servant in this museum," he said. "Perhaps my name is as good in my country as yours is in your own!"

"Oh, do—do listen to me one minute," I said. "If you will only hear me, I think I can make you understand. I do implore you not to be so angry."

"I am not angry. I have listen to you every time,—too many time. I have not time to listen any more!"

This he said so angrily that I felt the tears coming into my eyes. I was in despair. I turned to Harriet and said, "Very well, Harriet, we will go."

"You shall not go!" he exclaimed. "Twenty years I have shown this museum, and never yet was any one before dissatisfied with what I tell them. I have myself written this catalogue you carry," he cried, tapping my poor book with his fingers. "Now I will nothing say, and you can ask if you wish I should explain anything." And thereupon he folded his arms, and stepped back, the very picture of a splendid man in a sulk. Could anything be imagined droller, more unnecessary? I hesitated what to do. If I had not had a very strong desire to see the museum, I would have gone away, for he had really been almost unpardonably rude; yet I sympathized fully in his hot and hasty temper. I saw clearly wherein his mistake lay, and that on his theory of the situation he was right and I was wrong; and I thought perhaps if he watched me for a few minutes quietly he would see that I was very much in earnest in studying the collection, and that nothing had been further from my mind than any distrust of his knowledge. So I gulped down my wounded feelings, and went on looking silently at the cases and making my notes. Presently he began to cool down, to see his mistake, and before we had gone through the second room was telling me courteously about everything, waiting while I made my notes, and pointing out objects of especial interest. In less than half an hour he had ceased to be hostile, and before the end of the hour he had become friendly, and more,—seized both my hands in his, exclaiming, "We shall be good friends,—good!" He was as vivacious, imperious, and overwhelming in his friendliness as in his anger. "You must come again to Rosenborg; you must see it all. I will myself show you every room. No matter who sends to come in, they shall not be admitted. I go alone with you."

In vain I explained to him that I had only one more day in Copenhagen, and that I must spend that in going to Elsinore.

"No, you are not to go to Elsinore. It is not necessary. You shall not leave Copenhagen without seeing Rosenborg. Promise me that you will come again to Rosenborg. Promise! Take any hour you please, and I will come. You shall have four—five hours. Promise! Promise!" And he seized my hand in both of his, and held it, repeating, "Promise me! Promise! Oh, we shall be very good friends,—very good."

"Ah," I said, "I knew, if you only understood, you would be friendly; but I really cannot come again."

He pulled out his watch, made a gesture of despair. "I have to leave town in one little half-hour; and there are yet seventeen rooms you have not seen. You shall not leave Copenhagen till you have seen. Do you promise?"

I believe if I had not promised I should be still standing in the halls of the Rosenborg. When I finally said, "Yes, I promise," he wrung my hand again, and said,—

"Now we are good friends, we shall be all good friends. I will show to you all Rosenborg. Do you promise?"

"Yes," I said, "I promise," and drove away, leaving him standing on the sidewalk, his steel blue eyes flashing with determination and fire, and a smile on his face which I shall not forget. Never before did I see such passionate, fierce fulness of life in a man whose hair was white.

I promised, but I did not go. From the Rosenborg I drove to the Museum of Northern Antiquities,—from five to seven of that day being my only chance of seeing it at all. By the time I had spent two hours in the hurried attempt to see the most interesting things in this second collection, my brain was in a state of chaos, and I went back to my hotel with a sense of loathing of museums, only to be compared to the feeling one would have about dinners if he had eaten ten hearty ones in one day. One does not sleep off such an indigestion in one night. The next morning, nothing save actual terror could have driven me into a museum; and as my noble Dane was not present to cow me into obedience, I had energy enough to write him a note of farewell and regret. The regret was indeed heartfelt, not so much for the museum as for him. I would have liked to see those blue eyes flash out from under the gray eyebrows once more. I too felt that we would be "good friends,—good."

Now I will try to tell you a little of the little I remember of the Rosenborg. I only got as far as Frederick IV.'s time, 1730. Many of the most beautiful things in the museum I did not see, and of many that I did see I recollect nothing, especially of all which I looked at while I was in disgrace with the guide; I might as well not have seen them at all.

One little unpretending thing interested me greatly: it was a plain gold ring, with a small uncut sapphire in it; round the circle is engraved, "Ave Maria gr. [gratiosissima]." It was given by King Christian to his wife, Elizabeth, on their wedding-day, Aug. 12, 1515,—three hundred years and two weeks before the day I saw it. It lay near the great Oldenborg drinking-horn, and few people would care much for it by the side of the other, I suppose. Then there was another bridal ornament of a dead queen,—it had belonged to Dorothea, wife of Christian III.,—a gold plate, four or five inches square, with an eagle in the centre, bearing an escutcheon with the date 1557: on the eagle's breast a large uncut sapphire; over the eagle, an emerald and a sapphire; and under it, a sapphire and an amethyst, all very large. There are also pearls set here and there in the plate. This was given to the city of Copenhagen by the queen, to be worn by the daughters of the richest and most honored of the Danish people on their wedding-day. It was for many generations kept and used in this way, but finally the custom fell into disuse; and now the Copenhagen brides think no more of Queen Dorothea at their weddings, than of any other old gone-by queen,—which is a pity, it seems to me, for it surely was a lovely thought of hers to ally her memory to the bridals of young maidens in her land for all time.

There was in this room, also, Frederick II.'s Order of the Elephant, the oldest in existence, and held in great veneration by people who esteem ornaments of that sort. It is much less beautiful than some other orders of less distinction. The elephant is a clumsy beast, carve him never so finely, enamel him all you will, and call him what you like.

There is also here the Order of the Garter, of that same king—twenty-six enamelled red roses on blue shields held together by twists of gold cord; diamonds and pearls make it splendid, and that bit of gospel truth "Evil to him that evil thinks," is written on it in rubies, as it deserves to be written everywhere.

This Frederick must have been a gay fellow; for here stands a glass goblet, five inches in diameter, and fifteen high, out of which he and his set of boon companions fell to drinking one day on wagers to see who could drink the most, and scratched their names on the glass as they drank, each man his mark and record, little thinking that the glass would outlive them three centuries and more, as it has; and is likely now, unless Rosenborg burns down, to last the world out.

The thing I would rather own, of all this Frederick's possessions, would be one—I would be quite content with one—of the plates which Germany sent to him as a present. They are red in the middle, with gold escutcheons enamelled on them; the borders are of plain clear amber, rimmed with silver,—one big circle of amber! The piece from which it was cut was big enough to have made the whole plate, if they had chosen, but it was more beautiful to set it simply as a rim. Nothing could be dreamed of more beautiful in the way of a plate than this.

I told you in my last letter what a stamp Christian IV. had left on the capital of his kingdom. I fancy, without knowing anything about it, that he must have been one of the greatest kings Denmark ever had; at any rate, he built well, planned well for poor people, worked with a free hand for art and science, fought like a tiger, and loved—well, he loved like a king, I suppose; for he had concubines from every country in Europe, and no end of illegitimate princes and princesses whom he brought up, maintained, and educated in the most royal fashion. He lived many years in this Rosenborg; and when he found he must die, was brought back here, and died in a little room we should think small to-day for a man to lie mortally ill in; but he lived only one week after he was brought back, and it was in winter-time, so the open fireplace ventilated the room.

The upper half of the walls is covered with dark green moire silk, with gold flowers on it; the lower half is covered with paintings, many portraits among them; and in places of honor among the portraits, the king's favorite dogs, Wild-brat and Tyrk.

Here are his silver compasses and his ship hand-lantern; the silver scales in which he weighed out his gold and silver; a little hand printing-press, dusty and worn, with the brass stamp with his monogram on it,—his occupation in rainy days of leisure. Here, also, are the tokens of his idle moments,—a silver goblet made out of money won by him from four courtiers, who had all betted with him, on one 6th of February, which would be first drunk before Easter. These were the things that I cared most for,—more than for the splendors, of which there were closets full, glass cases full, tables full: goblets of lapis lazuli, jasper, agate, and crystal, gold and silver; lamps of crystal; cabinets of ebony; orders and rings and bracelets and seals and note-books and clocks and weapons, all of the costliest and most beautiful workmanship; rubies and diamonds and pearls, set and sewed wherever they could be; a medicine spoon, with gold for its handle and a hollowed sapphire for its bowl, for instance,—the sapphire nearly one inch across. One might swallow even allopathic medicine out of such a spoon as that: and I dare say that it was when she was very ill, and had a lot of nasty doses to take, that Madame Kirstin—one of the left-handed wives—got from the sympathizing king this dainty little gift. "C" and "K" are wrought into a monogram on the handle, which is three inches long, of embossed gold. Another sapphire, clear as a drop of ocean water with sunlight piercing it, and one inch square, is in the same case with the medicine spoon. A chalice, with wafer-box, paten, and cup, all of the finest gold, engraved, enamelled, and set thick with precious stones, has a gold death's-head and cross-bones on the stem of the chalice; and the eyes of the death's-head are two great rose diamonds, which gleam out frightfully. Another gold chalice has on its under side a twisted network of Arabesque, with sixty-six enamelled rosettes, all openwork on it.

In the room called Christian's workroom is a set of caparisons for a horse,—saddle, saddle-cloth, housing, and holsters, all of black velvet, sewn thick, even solid, with pearls and gold, rubies, sapphires, and rose diamonds. The sight of them flashing in sunlight on a horse's back must have been dazzling. These were a wedding present from King Christian to his son.

In this room also are several suits of Christian's clothes,—jerkin, trousers, and mantle, in the fashion of that day, dashing enough, even when made of common stuffs; but these are of cloth of gold, silver moire, black Brabant lace, trimmed in the most lavish way with gold and silver laces, and embroidered with pearls and gold. There is a suit of dirty and blood-stained linen hanging in one of the locked cabinets which does him more credit than these. It is the suit he wore at the great naval battle where he lost his eye. A shell exploding on the deck, a fragment of it flew into his face and instantly destroyed his right eye. His men thought all was lost; but he, seizing his handkerchief, clapped it into the bleeding socket, and fought on. One reads of such heroic deeds as this with only a vague thrill of wonder and admiration; but to see and touch the very garments the hero wore is another thing. This old blood-stained velvet jerkin is worth more to the Danish people than all the scores of bejewelled robes in the Rosenborg; and I think there are literally scores of them.

Next to Christian IV. came Frederick III.; and in his reign the rococo style ruled everything. Three rooms in the Rosenborg are devoted to the relics of this king's reign; and a great deal of hideous magnificence they hold, it must be confessed,—cabinets and tables and candlesticks and ceilings and walls, which are as jarring to the eye as the Chinese gong is to the ear, and appear to be just about as civilized. But the rococo had not yet spoiled everything. The jewelled cups and boxes and spoons and miniatures are as beautiful as ever; a set of glass spoons with handles of gold and of agate and of crystal; the gold knives and forks that Frederick III. and his queen used to travel with. In those days when you were asked to tea you carried your own implements; ivory cups, gold goblets, and goblets of crystal, a goblet made out of one solid topaz, and a great tankard made of amber,—these are a few of the little necessaries of every-day life to Frederick's court. His motto was "Dominus providebit;" it is on half of his splendid possessions,—on his mosaic tables and his jewelled canes and pomade boxes; everywhere it looms up, in unwitting but delicious satire on the habit Frederick had of providing for himself, and most lavishly too, all sorts of superfluities, which the Lord never would think of providing for any human being!—such, for instance, as a jewel box of silver, with fifteen splendidly cut crystals let into the sides, so that one can look through into the box and see on the bottom a fine bit of embossed work, the picture of the Judgment of Paris. Around these crystals sixty-two large garnets are set, and these again are surrounded by wreaths of flowers and leaves in embossed work, set thick with more diamonds than could be counted. A very pretty thing in its way, to stand on a dressing-table and hold the kind of rings worn at this time by the kind of persons who reigned in Denmark! Another pretty little thing he had,—not so useful as the jewel-box, but in far more perfect taste,—was a crystal goblet, in shape of a shell, resting on the back of a bending Cupid. Eight beautiful heads are cut on the sides of this cup, and there is standing on its curling base a winged boy. Its translucent shades and shadows are beautiful beyond words. It is said to be the most beautiful specimen in the world of work in pure crystal. The topaz goblet and the amber tankard, however, would outrival it in most eyes. I longed to see the topaz cup held up to the sun, filled with pale wine. I believe you could hear it shine! The third of the rooms devoted to Frederick and his reign is called the Marble Chamber, and is a superb icy place; floor and walls all marble. In cabinets in this room are some of Frederick's clothes,—every-day clothes, such as dark brown cloth, ornamented down every seam with gold and silver lace; and a dress of his queen's, the only dress of a woman which has come down from that age. It is one solid mass of embroidery in gold and gay colors on silk, stiff as old tapestry; loops of faded pink ribbon down the front, and a long jabot of old point lace all the way down the front. There are also a sword and sword-belt, and a gun bearing the initials of this lady. The gun has a medallion of ivory let in at the butt end, with her initials, "S. A.," and her motto, "In God is my hope." There is something uncommonly droll in these mottoes of faith in God's providing, inscribed on so many articles of luxury by people who must have certainly spent a good part of their time in providing for themselves.

In the last part of the seventeenth century things in Denmark were more and more stamped by the French influence. Christian V., who succeeded to Frederick III., had spent some time in the court of Louis XIV., and wanted to make his own court as much like it as possible. So we find, in the rooms devoted to Christian V.'s reign, tapestries and cabinets which might all have come from France. One of the saloons is hung with superb tapestry, all with a red ground; and the tables and mirrors and chairs are all gilded and carved in the last degree of fantastic decoration. This red room used to be Christian's dining-room; and the plate-warmers still stand before the fireplace,—two feet high, round, solid silver, every inch engraved.

Caskets of amber, of ivory; drinking-horns,—one-third horn and two-thirds embossed silver,—bowls and globes of wrought silver, hunting-cups of solid silver made to fit into deer's antlers and with coral knobs for handles; closets full of fowling-pieces, pistols, silver-sheathed hunting-knives, falcon hoods set with real pearls and embroidered in gold,—orders of all sorts known to Denmark; elephants and St. Georges in silver and crystal and cameo; gold jugs, gold beakers, bowls of green jade, with twisted snakes for handles and dragons' heads at bottom; goblets of solid crystal, of countless shapes and sizes,—one in shape of a flying-fish borne by two dolphins; onyx and jasper and agate and porcelain, made into no end of shapes and uses;—these are a few of the things which "God provided" for this Danish king and queen. One of these rooms is hung with tapestries of lilac silk and gold moire, embroidered with gold and silver threads and colors. These were provided by Frederick himself, who brought them from Italy.

But you don't care a fig who brought the things, or when they were brought; and perhaps you don't care very much about the things anyhow. I dare say they do not sound half as superb as they were; but I must tell you of a few more. What do you think of a room with walls, ceiling, and a large space in the centre of the floor all of plate glass, the rest of the floor being of exquisite mosaic in wood; and of a coat of crimson velvet embroidered thick with silver thread, to be worn with a pale blue waistcoat, also embroidered stiff with silver thread; and of cups cut out of rubies; and a great bowl of obsidian set with rubies and garnets; and of topazes big enough to cut heads on in fine relief? There are hundreds and hundreds more of things I have not mentioned, and hundreds of things I did not see even, in the rooms I walked through; and there were seventeen rooms more into which I did not even go. If I had, I should have seen twelve superb tapestries, 12 feet in height, by 10 to 20 feet broad, each giving a picture of a battle, and all strictly historical; the Royal Font, of solid embossed silver, inside which is placed at every christening another dish of gold; one whole room full of the costliest and rarest porcelain from all parts of the world,—here is the splendid and famous "Flora Danica" service. I saw at a porcelain shop a reproduction of this service, every article bearing some Danish flower most exquisitely painted. A great platter heaped full of wild roses was as lovely as a day in June. Here also are the Danish Regalia, kept in a room hung with Oriental carpets, and with a floor of black and white marble. "In the middle of the floor a pyramid arises behind clear thick plate glass, from the flat sides of which, covered with red velvet, the rays of gold and precious stones flash upon us, whilst the summit is adorned by a magnificent and costly crown." This sentence is from the catalogue written by my friend the noble Dane, and is a very favorable specimen of his English. Bless him, how I do wish I had gone back to that museum! At this distance of time it seems incomprehensible to me that I did not. But that day I felt as if one more look at the simple door of a museum would make a maniac of me. So this is all I can tell you about the famous Rosenborg. And with the others I will not bore you much, for I have made this so long; only I must tell you that in the Ethnographic, which is in some respects, I suppose, the most valuable of them all, having five rooms full of Prehistoric antiquities from the stone, bronze, and early iron ages in every part of the world, and twenty or thirty rooms more full of characteristic things,—dresses, implements, ornaments, weapons, of the uncultivated savage or semi-savage races, also of the Chinese, Persians, Arabians, Turks, East Indians, etc.;—in this museum I found a most important place assigned to the North American Indian; and Dr. Steinhauer, the director of the museum, a man whose ethnographical studies and researches have made him known to all antiquarians in the world was full of interest in them, and appreciation of their noble qualities, of their skill and taste in decoration, and still more of the important links between them and the old civilizations. Here were portraits of all the most distinguished of our Indian chiefs; a whole corridor filled with glass cases full of their robes, implements, weapons, decorations; several life-size figures in full war-dress: and their trappings were by no means put to shame, in point of design and color, by the handsomest trappings in Rosenborg; in fact, they were far more wonderful, being wrought by an uncivilized race, living in wildernesses, with only rude paints, porcupine quills, and glass beads to work with. My eyes filled with tears, I confess, to find at last in little Denmark one spot in the world where there will be kept a complete pictorial record of the race of men that we have done our best to wipe out from the face of the earth,—where historical justice will be done to them in the far future, as a race of splendid possibilities, and attainments marvellous, considering the time in which they were made. Here was a superb life-size figure of a Blackfeet warrior on his horse; the saddle, trappings, etc., are exactly the same in shape and style as an old Arab saddle used hundreds of years ago. On the warrior's breast is a round disk of lines radiating from a centre, in gay colors, of straw and beads, of a device identical with a rich Moorish ornament; the same device Dr. Steinhauer pointed out to me on a medicine-bag of the Blackfeet tribe.

Here was a figure of a chief of the Sacs and Foxes, in full array; by his side the portrait of his father, with the totem of the tribe tattooed on his breast. With enthusiasm Dr. Steinhauer pointed out to me how in one generation the progress had been so great that on the robe of the son was set in a fine and skilful embroidery the same totem which the father had rudely tattooed on his breast. Here were specimens of the handiwork of every tribe,—of their dresses, of their weapons; those of each tribe carefully assorted by themselves. Dr. Steinhauer knew more, I venture to say, about the different tribes, their race affinities and connections, than any man in America knows to-day. When I told him a little about the scorn and hatred which are felt in America towards the Indians, the indifference with which their fate is regarded by the masses of the people, and the cruel injustice of our government towards them, he listened to me with undisguised astonishment, and repeated again and again and again, "It is inexplicable; I cannot understand."

You can imagine what a thrilling pleasure all this was to me. But it was marred by the keenest sense of shame of my country, that it should have been left for Denmark alone to keep a place in historical archives for a fair showing and true appreciation of the "wards of the United States Government."

I might fill another letter with accounts of the "Collection of Northern Antiquities;" but don't be frightened: I won't, only to tell you that it is far the largest and most complete in Europe. And you may see there a specimen of everything that has been made, wrought, and worn in the way of stone, bronze, iron, or gold and silver, in the north countries, from the rude stone chisel with which the prehistoric man pried open his oyster and clam shells at picnics on the shore, and went away and left his shells and "openers" in a careless pile behind him, so that we could dig them all up together some thousands of years later, down to the superb gold bracelets worn by the strong-armed women who queened it in Norway ten centuries ago. It is a great thing for us that those old fellows had such a way of flinging their ornaments into lakes as offerings to gods, and burying them by the wheelbarrow-full in graves. It wasn't a safe thing to do, even as long ago as that, however; for there are traces in many of these burial-mounds of their having been opened and robbed at some period far back. In one of the rooms of this museum are several huge oak coffins, with the mummied or half-petrified bodies lying in them, just as they were buried sixteen hundred years ago. The coffins were made of whole trunks of trees, hollowed out so as to make a sort of trough with a lid; and in this the body was laid, with all its usual garments on. There is an indescribable and uncanny fascination in the sight of one of these old mummies,—the eyeless sockets, the painful cheekbone, the tight-drawn forehead; they look so human and unhuman at once, so awfully dead and yet somehow so suggestive of having been alive, that it stimulates a far greater curiosity to know what they did and thought and felt, than it is possible to feel about neighbors to-day. I never see half a dozen of these mummies together without wishing they would sit up and take up the thread of their gossip where they left it off,—so different from the feeling one has about live gossips, and so utterly unreasonable too; for gossip is gossip all the same, and nothing but an abomination in any age, whether that of Pharaoh or Ulysses Grant. If I did not feel a dreadful misgiving that you had had enough museum already, and would be bored by more, I really would like to tell you about a few more of these things: a necklace, found in a peat bog by a poor devil who had begged leave to cut a bit of turf there to burn, and to be sure he found eleven beautiful gold things of one sort and another. The necklace is very heavy to lift. I asked permission to take it in my hands. I laid it around my neck, and it would have hurt to wear it ten minutes. It was a great snake coil of solid gold, the body half as big as my wrist! If Queen Thyra wore it, she must have been a giantess, or else have had a wadded "chest protector" underneath her necklaces. She and her husband, King Gorm, were buried in two enormous mounds in Jutland, some fourteen hundred years ago. The mounds were so high that they nearly overtopped the little village church; and yet, at some time or other, robbers had burrowed into them, and carried off a lot of things, so that when the mounds were scientifically excavated, few relics were found. Stealing from that sort of grave seems to make the modern methods of body-snatching quite insignificant. Even A. T. Stewart's body would have been safe if it had been in a mound as high as the church steeple.

Now I must tell you a little more about Harriet. She leaves me to-morrow, and I shall grieve at parting with the garrulous old soul. Niobe, I call her in my own mind; for she melts into tears at the least emotion. I am afraid nobody has ever been very good to her; for the smallest kindness touches her to the quick, and she cannot refrain from perpetually breaking out into expressions of fondness for me, and gratitude, which are sometimes tiresome. The explanation of her good English is that her parents were English, though she was born in Copenhagen, has lived there all her life, and married a Dane when she was quite young. He was a tradesman, and they lived in comparative comfort, though, as she said, "we never could lay up a penny, because we always sent the children to the best schools; and for ten children, ma'am, it does take a heap of schooling!"

Of the ten children, six are still living; and Harriet, at sixty-four, has thirty-six grandchildren. When she first came to me she looked ten years older than she does now. Good food, freedom from care, and her enjoyment of her journey have almost worked miracles on her face. Every morning she has come out looking better than she did the night before. I see that she must have been a very handsome woman in her day,—delicate features, and a soft dark brown eye, with very great native refinement and gentleness of manner. Poor soul! her hardest days are before her, I fear; for the daughter with whom she lives, and for whom she works night and day, is the wife of that worthless fellow, our commissionnaire. He is a drunkard, and not much more than four fifths "witted." Harriet is pew-opener at the English church, and gets a little money from that; the clergyman is very kind to her, and she has the promise of a place at last in a sort of "Old Lady's Home" in Copenhagen. This is her outlook! I must send you the verses she presented to me yesterday. I had left her alone for the greater part of the forenoon, and she took to her pen for company. That was the way Katrina used to amuse herself when I left her alone. I always found her sitting with her elbows on the table, a pile of scribbled sheets in front of her, her hair pushed off her forehead, and a general expression of fine frenzy about her. Katrina's English did not compare with Harriet's at all; that is, it was not so good. I liked it far better. It was one perpetual fund of amusement to me; but I think Katrina had more nearly a vein of genius about her, and she was not sentimental; whereas Harriet is a sentimentalist of the first water,—no, of the "seventy thousandth"!

Paris, September 19.

I kept my letter and brought it here to tell you about Ole Bull's funeral, full accounts of which reached the H——'s just before we left Munich on the 9th. It was a splendid tribute to the dear old man; I shall always regret that I did not see it. His home is on a beautiful island about sixteen miles from Bergen. If it were only possible to make you understand how much more the word island means in Norway than anywhere else! But it is not. To those of you who know the sort of mountain pasture in which great hillocks of moss and stone are thrown up, piled up, crowded in, in such labyrinths that you go leaping from one to the other, winding in and out in crevice-like paths, never knowing where moss leaves off and stone begins,—where you will strike firm footing, and where you will plunge your foot down suddenly into moss above your ankles; and to those of you who love the country and the spring in the country so well that you know just the look of a feathery young birch-tree on the first day of June, and of slender young spruce-trees all the year round, it is enough to say that if you take a dozen miles or so of such a pasture, and make the hillocks many feet high, and then set in here and there little hollows full of the birches, and a ravine or two full of the young spruces, and then launch your hillocks and birches and spruces straight out into deep blue sea, you'll have something such an island as there are thousands of on the Norway coast. Ole Bull's home was on such an island as this, and he had made it an ideally beautiful place. Eighteen miles of pathway he had made in the labyrinths of the island; had brought soil from the shore, and set gardens in hollows here and there. The house is a picturesque and delightful one; and in the great music-room, nearly a hundred feet long, there he lay dead, two days, in state like a king, with steamers full of sorrowing friends and mourning strangers coming to take their last look at his face. The king sent a letter of condolence to Mrs. Bull, and the peasants came weeping to the side of his bed; from highest to lowest, Norway mourned. On the day of the funeral, after some short services at the house, the body was carried on board a steamer, to be taken to Bergen. The steamer was draped with black and strewn with green. I believe I have told you of the beautiful custom the Norwegians have of strewing green juniper twigs in the street in front of their houses whenever they have lost a friend. No matter how far away the friend may have lived, when they hear of his death they strew the juniper around their house to show that a death has given them sorrow. It was a commentary on human life (and death!) that I never went out in Bergen without seeing in some street, and often in many, the juniper-strewn sidewalks. As the steamer with Ole Bull's body approached the entrance of Bergen harbor, sixteen steamers, all draped in black, with flags at half-mast, sailed out to meet it, turned, and fell into line on either side to convoy it to shore. Bands were playing his music all the way. At the wharf they were met by nearly all Bergen; and the body was borne in grand procession through the streets, which were strewn thick with juniper from the wharf to the cemetery, at least two or three miles. The houses were all draped with black, and many of the people had put on black. The golden wreath which was given him in San Francisco was borne in the procession by one of his friends, and a procession of little girls bore wreaths and bouquets of flowers. The grave was hidden and half filled with flowers; and last of all, after the body had been laid there,—last and most touching of all, came the peasants, crowds of them, gathering close, and each one flinging in a fern leaf or a juniper bough or a bunch of flowers. Every one had brought something, and the grave was nearly filled up with their offerings. It is worth while to be loved like that by a people. Whatever scientific critics may say of Ole Bull's playing, he played so that he swayed the hearts of the common people; and his own nation loved him and were proud of him, just as the Danes loved Hans Christian Andersen, with a love that asked no indorsement and admitted no question from the outside world. The school of music to which Ole Bull belonged has passed away; but what scientific art has gained the people have lost. It will never be seen that one of these modern violinists can make uneducated people smile and weep as he did. The flowers that are dying on his coffin are all immortelles. Such blossoms as these will never again be strewn by peasant hands in a player's grave.

It took two days to come from Munich to Paris,—two hard days, from seven in the morning till six at night. We broke the journey by sleeping at Strasburg, where we had just one hour to see the wonderful cathedral and its clock. The clock I didn't care so much about, though the trick of it is a marvel; but the twilight of the cathedral, lit up by its great roses of topaz and amethyst, I shall never forget as long as I live. In my next letter I will tell you about it. But now I have only time to copy Harriet's verses, and send off this letter. Here they are:—

Poor thing! when she bade me good-by she began to shed tears, and I had to be almost stern with her to stop their flow. "Tell your husband," she said, "that there's a little creature in Denmark that you've made very happy, that'll never forget you," and she was gone. In about ten minutes a tap at the door; there was Harriet again, with a big paper of grapes and a deprecating face. "Excuse me, ma'am, but they were only one mark and a half a pound, and they 're much better than you'd get them in the hotel. Oh, I'll not lose my train, ma'am; I've plenty of time." And with another kiss on my hand she ran out of the room. Faithful creature! I shall never see her again in this world, but I shall remember her with gratitude as long as I live. Surely nowhere except in Norway and Denmark could it have happened to a person to find in the sudden exigency of the moment two such devoted servants as Katrina and Harriet; and that they should have both been rhymers was a doubling up of coincidences truly droll.

Paris is as detestable as ever,—literally a howling and waste place! Of all the yells and shrieks that ever made air discordant, surely the cries of Paris are the loudest and worst. My room looks on the street; and I should say that at least three different Indian tribes in distress and one in drunken hilarity were wailing and shouting under my windows all the time! As for the fiacre-men,—how like fiasco, fiacre looks written!—they drive as if their souls' salvation depended on just grazing the wheel of every vehicle they pass. When two of them yell out at once, as they go by each other, it is enough to deafen one.

III.

Dear People,—I couldn't give you a better illustration of what happens to you in foreign countries when you pin your faith on people who are said to "speak English here," than by giving you the tale of how I went from Copenhagen to Lubeck. To begin with, I explained to the porter of the KÖnig von Denmark Hotel, who is one of the English-speaking attachÉs of that very good hotel, that I wished, in going to Lubeck, to avoid water as much as possible. I endeavored to convey to him that my horror of it was in fact hydrophobic, and that I could go miles out of my way to escape it. He understood me perfectly, he said; and he explained to me a fine route by which I was to cross island after island by rail, have only short intervals of water between, and come comfortably to Lubeck by eight in the evening, provided I would leave Copenhagen at 6.45 in the morning, which I was only too happy to do for the sake of escaping a long steamboat journey. So I arranged everything to that end; explained to the one waiter who spoke English that I must have breakfast on the table at 5.40, as I was to leave the house at 6.15. He understood perfectly, he said. (I also commissioned him to buy a pound of grapes for my lunch-basket; the relevancy of this will appear later.) I then carefully explained to the worthy old lady who had promised for a small consideration to take me to Munich, that she must be on the spot at six, with her luggage; and that she was on no account to bring anything to lift in her hands, because my own hand-luggage would be all she could well handle. Then I asked for my bill, that it might be settled the night beforehand, to have nothing on hand in the morning but to get off. This was doubly important, as the landlord had promised to change my Danish money into German money for me,—the Danish bankers having no German money. They so hate Germany that they consider it a disgrace, I believe, even to handle marks and pfennigs. The clerk, who also "speaks English," said he understood me perfectly; so I went upstairs cheerful and at ease in my mind. In half an hour my bill arrived; and I sent down by the waiter, who spoke "a leetle" English, five hundred Danish crowns to pay my bill, and have four hundred crowns returned to me in marks. Waited one hour, no money; rang, same waiter appeared.

"Where is my money?"

"Yees, it have gone out; it will soon return. He is not here."

Waited half an hour longer; rang again.

"Where is my money?"

"Yees, strachs. He shall all right, strachs."

"But I am very tired; I wish to go to bed."

"Yees, it shall be kommen."

Waited another half-hour,—it was now quarter of eleven; wrote on a bit of paper, "I have gone to bed; cannot take the money to-night. Have it ready for me at six in the morning." Rang, and gave it to the waiter, ejaculating, "Bureau;" and pointing downstairs, shut the door on him and went to bed. The last thing I heard from him, as I shut the door, was, "Strachs, strachs!" That means "Immediately;" and there is a Norwegian proverb that "when the Norwegian says 'Strachs,' he will be with you in half an hour."

At twenty-five minutes before six I was in the dining-room, bonneted, all ready; no sign or symptom of breakfast. I went to the little room beyond, where the waiters are to be found. There was the one who speaks least English. "Oh, goodness!" said I, "where is Wilhelm?" Wilhelm being the one mainstay of the establishment in the matter of English, and the one who had waited upon me during all my stay.

"Ya, ya. Wilhelm here; soon will be kommen."

"But I must have my breakfast; I leave the house in half an hour."

"Ya, ya. Wilhelm is not yet. He sleeps." And the good-natured little fellow darted off to call him. Poor Wilhelm had indeed overslept; but he appeared in a miraculously short time, got my breakfast together by bits, got the money from the clerk, and did his best to explain to me how it was that a given sum of money was at once more and less in marks than it was in kroner. I crammed it all into my pocket, and ran downstairs to find—no old lady; her "knapsack" on the driver's seat, but she herself not there. Four different people said something to me about it, and I could not understand one word they said; so I stepped into the carriage, sat down, and resigned myself to whatever was coming next. After about ten minutes she appeared, breathless, coming down the stairs of the hotel. She had mounted to my room, and, unmindful of the significant fact that the door was wide open and all my luggage gone, had been waiting there for me. This augured well for the journey! However, there was no time for misgivings; and we drove off at a tearing rate, late for the train. Suddenly I spied a most disreputable-looking parcel on the seat,—large, clumsy, done up in an old dirty calico curtain, from which a few brass rings were still hanging.

"What is that?" I exclaimed.

"Only my best gown, ma'am, and my velvet cloak. I couldn't disgrace you, ma'am."

"Disgrace me!" thought I. "I was never before disgraced by such a bundle."

"But I told you to bring nothing whatever to carry in your hands," I said; "you must put that into your knapsack. My roll and basket are all you can possibly lift."

"Oh, ma'am, it would ruin it to put it in the knapsack. I'm not a rich lady, like you, ma'am; it's all I've got: but I'd not like to disgrace you. I was out last night trying to hire a small trunk to bring; but you wouldn't believe it, ma'am, they wanted eight kroner down for the deposit for the value of it. But I'll not disgrace you, ma'am, and I'll forget nothing. I've a good head at counting. You'll see I'll not overlook anything."

"Never mind," I said; "you must wear your cloak [she had on only a little thin, clinging, black crape shawl,—the most pitiful of garments, and no more protection than a pocket-handkerchief against cold], and the dress must go into the knapsack at Lubeck. I will put it into my own roll as soon as we are in the cars."

At the station—luckily, as I thought—the ticket-seller spoke English, and replied readily to my inquiry for a ticket to Lubeck, by rail, "Yes, by Kiel." Then there came a man who wanted three kroner more because my trunk was heavy, and another who wanted a few pfennigs for having helped the first one lift it. I tried for a minute to count out the sum he had mentioned, and then I said, "Oh, good gracious, take it all!" emptying the few little coppers and tiny silver bits—which I knew must be, all told, not a quarter of a dollar—into his hand. He said something which, in my innocence, I supposed was thanks, but Brita told me afterwards that he was a "fearfully rough man, and what he said was to call me a 'damned German devil!' You see, ma'am, they all hate the Germans so, and hearing me speak English, he thought it was German. The French, too, ma'am,—they hate the Germans too. They say that Sara Bernhardt,—I dare say you've seen her, ma'am,—they say she nearly starved herself all in her travelling through Germany, because she wouldn't eat the German food."

At the train to see me off were two dear warm-hearted Danish women,—mother and daughter,—to whom I had brought a letter from friends in America. With barely time to thank them and say good-by, I and my old lady and her bundle and my own three parcels were all hustled into a carriage, the door slammed and locked, and we were off. Then I sank back and considered the situation. I had fancied that all that was necessary was to have a person who could speak,—that if I had but a tongue at my command, it would answer my purposes almost as well in another person's head as in my own. But I was fast learning my mistake. This good old woman, who had never been out of Denmark in her life, had no more idea which way to turn or what to do in a railway station than a baby. The first five minutes of our journey had shown that. She stood, bundles in hand, her bonnet falling off the back of her head, her crape shawl clinging limp to her figure; her face full of nervous uncertainty,—the very ideal of a bewildered old woman, such as one always sees at railway stations. The thought of being taken charge of, all the way from Copenhagen to Munich, by this type of elderly female, was, at the outset, awful; but very soon the comical side of it came over me so thoroughly that I began to think it would, on the whole, be more entertaining.

When she had told me the day before, as we were driving about in Copenhagen, that she had never in her life been out of Denmark, though she was sixty-four years old, I said, "Really that is a strange thing,—for you to be taking your first journey at that age."

"Oh, well, ma'am," she said, "I'm such a child of Nature that I shall enjoy it as much as if I were younger, and I've all the Danish history, ma'am, at my tongue's end, ma'am. There's nothing I can't tell you, ma'am. Though we've been very hard-working, I've always been one that was for making all I could: and I've been with my children at their lessons always,—we gave them all good schooling; and I've a volume of Danish poetry I've written, ma'am,—a volume that thick," marking off at least two inches on her finger.

"Danish?" said I. "Why did you not write it in English?"

"Well, ma'am, being raised here, the Danish tongue is more my own, much as I spoke English always till my parents died; but I'll write some in English for you, ma'am, before we part."

So I had for the third time alighted on a poet. "Birds of a feather," thought I to myself; but it really is extraordinary. Norwegian, Dane—I wonder, if I take a German maid to carry me to Oberammergau, if she also will turn out "a child of Nature" and a scribbler of verses.

The way from Copenhagen southward and westward by land is delightful. It plunges immediately into a rich farming-country, level as an Illinois prairie, and with comfortable farm-houses set in enclosures of trees, as they are there; and I presume for the same reason,—to break the force of the winds which might sweep from one end of Denmark to the other, without so much as a hillock to stay them: no fences, only hedges, and great tracts without even a hedge, marked off and divided by differing colors from the different crops. The second crop of clover was in full flower; acres of wheat or barley, just being sheaved; wagons piled full, rolling down shaded roads with long lines of trees on each side. Roeskilde, Ringsted, Soro,—three towns, but seemingly only one great farm, for seventeen miles out of Copenhagen. Then we began to smell the salt water, and to get a fresh breeze in at the windows; and presently we came to KosÖr, where we were to take boat. A big man in uniform stood at the door of the station, looked at our tickets, said "Kiel," and waved his hand toward a little steamer lying at the dock.

"They say they fear it will be rough, ma'am, as the wind is from the southeast," said the old lady.

"Oh, well," said I, "it is only an hour and a half across. We cross the Big Belt to Nyborg."

She accepted my statement as confidingly as a child, and we made ourselves comfortable on the upper deck. It was half-past nine o'clock. I took out my guide-book and studied up the descriptions of the different towns we were to pass through after our next landing. A green dome-like island came into sight, with a lighthouse on top, looking like the stick at the top of a haystack. "That's in the middle of the Belt, ma'am," said Brita. "In the winter many's the time the passengers across here have to land there and stay a day, or maybe two; and sometimes they come on the ice-boats. Very dangerous they are; they pull them on the ice, and if the ice breaks, jump in and row them."

It seemed to me that we were bearing strangely to the south: land was disappearing from view; the waves grew bigger and higher; spray dashed on the deck; white-caps tossed in all directions.

"I believe we are going out to sea," said I.

"It does look like it, ma'am," replied the "child of Nature." "Shall I go and ask?"

"Yes," I replied, "go and ask." She returned with consternation in every line of her aged face.

"Oh, ma'am, it's strange they should have told you so wrong. We're on this boat till four in the afternoon."

And so we were, and a half-hour to boot, owing to the southeast wind which was dead ahead all the way. Everybody was ill,—my poor old protectress most of all, and for the first time in her life.

"Oh, ma'am, I did not think it could be like this," she gasped. "I never did feel so awful." I sat grimly still in one spot on the deck all that day. What a day it was! About noon it occurred to me that some grapes would be a relief to my misery. Opening the basket and taking out the bag in which the English-speaking waiter had told me were my grapes, I put in my hand and drew out—a hard, corky, tasteless pear! Thanks to the southeast wind, we came a half-hour late to Kiel, and thereby missed the train to Lubeck which we should have taken, waited two hours and a half in the station, and then had to take three different trains one after the other, and pay an extra fare on each one; how we ever stumbled through I don't know, but we did, and at half-past eleven we were in Lubeck, safe and sound, and not more than three quarters dead! and I shall laugh whenever I think of it as long as I live.

Lubeck is an old town, well worth several days' study; and the Stadt Hamburg is a comfortable house to sleep and be fed in. You can have a mutton-chop there, and that is a thing hard to find in Germany; and you can have your mutton-chop brought to you by an "English-speaking" waiter who speaks English; and you may have it delicately served in your own room, or in a pretty dining-room, or on a front porch, walled in thick by oleander-trees, ten and fifteen feet high,—a lustrous wall of green, through which you have glimpses of such old gables and high peaked roofs, red-tiled, and scooped into queer curves, as I do not know elsewhere except in Nuremberg. It all dates back to 1100 and 1200, and thereabouts,—which does not sound so very old to you when you have just come from Norway, where a thing is not ancient unless it dates back to somewhere near Christ's time; but for a mediÆval town, Lubeck has a fine flavor of antiquity about it. It has some splendid old gateways, and plenty of old houses, two-thirds roof, one-third gable, and four-fifths dormer-window, with door-posts and corners carved in the leisurely way peculiar to that time. Really, one would think a man must have his house ordered before he was born, to have got it done in time to die in, in those days. I have speculated very much about this problem, and it puzzles me yet. So many of these old houses look as if it must have taken at least the years of one generation to have made the carvings on them; perhaps the building and ornamentation of the house was a thing handed down from father to son and to son's son, like famous games of chess. Nothing less than this seems to me to explain the elaboration of fine hand-wrought decorations in the way of carving and tapestries, which were the chief splendors of splendid living in those old times. There is a room in the Merchants' Exchange in Lubeck, which is entirely walled and ceiled with carved wood-work taken out of an ancient house belonging to one of Lubeck's early burgomasters. These carvings were done in 1585 by "an unknown master," and were recently transferred to this room to preserve them. The panels of wood alternate with panels of exquisitely wrought alabaster; two rows of these around the room. There were old cupboard doors, now firmly fastened on the wall, never to swing again; and one panel, with a group of wood-carvers at work, said—or guessed—to be the portraits of the carver and his assistants. The old shutters are there,—each decorated with a group, or single figure,—every face as expressive as if it were painted in oil by a master's hand. Every inch of the wall is wrought into some form of decorations; the ceiling is carved into great squares, with alabaster knobs at the intersections; a superb chandelier of ancient Venetian glass hangs in the middle; and the new room stands to-day exactly as the old one stood in the grand old burgomaster's day. It is kept insured by the Merchants' Guild for $30,000, but twice that sum could not replace it. The Merchants' Guild of Lubeck must contain true art-lovers; a large room opening from this one has also finely carved walls, and a frieze of the old burgomasters' portraits, and another fine Venetian glass chandelier, two centuries old. Through the window I caught a glimpse of a spiral stair outside the building; it wound in short turns, and the iron balustrade was a wall of green vines; it looked like the stair to the chamber of a princess, but it was only the outside way to another room where the Merchants held their sittings.

The largest of the Lubeck churches is the Church of Saint Mary. This was built so big, it is said, simply to outdo the cathedral in size, the Lubeck citizens being determined to have their church bigger than the bishop's. The result is three hundred and thirty-five feet of a succession of frightful rococo things, enough to drive the thought of worship out of any head that has eyes in it. The exterior is fine, being of the best style of twelfth-century brick-work, and there are some fine and interesting things to be seen inside; but the general effect of the interior is indescribably hideous, with huge grotesque carvings in black and white marble and painted wood, at every pillar of the arches. In one of the chapels is a series of paintings, ascribed to Holbein,—"The Dance of Death." It is a ghastly picture, with a certain morbid fascination about it,—a series of fantastic figures, alternating with grim skeleton figures of Death. The emperor, the pope, the king and queen, the law-giver, the merchant, the peasant, the miser,—all are there, hand in hand with the grim, grappling, leaping skeleton, who will draw them away. Under each figure is a stanza of verse representing his excuse for delay, his reply to Death,—all in vain. This chapel had the most uncanny fascination to my companion.

"Oh, ma'am! oh, indeed, ma'am, it is too true!" she exclaimed, walking about, and peering through her spectacles at each motto. "It is all the same for the pope and the emperor. Death calls us all; and we all would like to stay a little longer."

By a fine bronze reclining statue of one of the old bishops she lingered. "Is it not wonderful, ma'am, the pride there is in this poor world?" she said. The reflection seemed to me a very just one, as I too looked at the old man lying there in his mitre, with the sacred wafer ostentatiously held in one hand, and his crosier in the other; every inch of him, and of the great bronze slab on which he lay, wrought as exquisitely as the finest etching.

At twelve o'clock every day a crowd gathers in this church to see a procession of little figures come out of the huge clock; the Lubeck people, it seems, never tire of this small miracle. It must be acknowledged that it is a droll sight: but one would think, seeing that there are only forty thousand people in the town, that there would now and then be a day without a crowd; yet the sacristan said, that, rain or shine, every day, the little chapel was full at the striking of the first stroke of twelve. The show is on the back of the clock, which detracts very much from its effect. At the instant of twelve a tiny white statue lifted its arm, struck a hammer on the bell twelve times; at the first stroke a door opened, and out came a procession of eight figures, called the Emperor and the Electors; each glided around the circle, paused in the middle, made a jerky bow to the figure of Christ in the centre, and then disappeared in a door in the other side, which closed after them. The figures seemed only a few inches tall at that great height; and the whole thing like part of a Punch and Judy show, and quite in keeping with the rococo ornaments on the pillars. But the crowd gazed as devoutly as if it had been the elevation of the Host itself; and I hurried away, fearing that they might resent the irreverent look on my countenance.

There are some carved brass tablets which are superb, and a curious old altar-piece, with doors opening after doors, like a succession of wardrobes, one inside the other, the first doors painted on the inside, the second also painted, and disclosing, on being opened, a series of wonderful wood carvings of Scriptural scenes, these opening out again and showing still others; a fine canopy of wrought wood above them, as delicate as filigree. These are disfigured, as so many of the exquisite wood carvings of this time are, by being painted in grotesque colors; but the carving is marvellous. The thing that interested me most in this church was a tiny little stone mouse carved at the base of one of the pillars. You might go all your life to that church and never see it. I searched for it long before I found it. It is a tiny black mouse gnawing at the root of an oak; and some old stone-worker put it in there six hundred years ago, because it was the ancient emblem of the city. There was also a line of old saints and apostles carved on the ends of the pews, that were fine; a Saint Christopher with the child on his shoulder that I would have liked to filch and carry away.

In the Jacobi Kirche—a church not quite so old—is a remarkable old altar, which a rich burgomaster hit on the device of bestowing on the church and immortalizing his own family in it at the same time. To make it all right for the church, he had the scene of the crucifixion carved in stone for the centre; then on the doors, which must be thrown back to show this stone carving, he had himself and his family painted. And I venture to say that the event justifies his expectations; for one looks ten minutes at the burgomaster's sons and daughters and wife for one at the stone carving inside. It is a family group not to be forgotten,—the burgomaster and his five sons behind him on one door, and his wife with her five daughters in front of her on the other door. They are all kneeling, so as to seem to be adoring the central figures,—all but the burgomaster's wife, who stands tall and stately, stiff in gold brocade, with a missal in one hand and a long feather in the other; a high cap of the same brocade, flying sleeves at the shoulder, and a long bodice in front complete the dame's array. Three of the daughters wear high foolscaps of white; white robes trimmed with ermine, falling from the back of the neck, thrown open to show fine scarlet gowns, with bodices laced over white, and coming down nearly to their knees in front. Two little things in long-sleeved dark-green gowns—"not out" yet, I suppose—kneel modestly in front; and a nun and a saint or a Virgin Mary are thrown into the group to make it holy. The burgomaster is in a black fur-trimmed robe, kneeling with a book open before him,—the very model of a Pharisee at family prayers,—his five sons kneeling behind him in scarlet robes trimmed with dark fur.

The sacristan said something in German to Brita, which she instantly translated to me as "Oh, ma'am, to think of it! They're all buried here under our very feet, ma'am,—the whole family! And they'd to leave all that finery behind them, didn't they, ma'am?" The thought of their actual dust being under our feet at that moment seemed to make the family portraits much more real. I dare say that burgomaster never did anything worthy of being remembered in all his life; but he has hit on a device which will secure him and his race a place in the knowledge of men for centuries to come.

In the Rathhaus—which is one of the quaintest buildings in Lubeck—there is an odd old chimney-piece. It is downstairs, in what one would call vaults, except that they are used for the rooms of a restaurant. It has been for centuries a Lubeck custom that when a couple have been married in the Church of Saint Mary (which adjoins the Rathhaus), they should come into this room to drink their first winecup together; and, by way of giving a pleasant turn to things for the bridegroom, the satirical old wood-carvers wrought a chimney-piece for this room with a cock on one side, a hen on the other, the Israelitish spies bearing the huge bunch of the over-rated grapes of Eshcol between them, and in the centre below it this motto: "Many a man sings loudly when they bring him his bride. If he knew what they brought him, he might well weep." It is an odd thing how universally, when this sort of slur upon marriage is aimed at, it is the man's disappointment which is set forth or predicted, and not the woman's. It is a very poor rule, no doubt; but it may at least be said to "work both ways." There used to be an underground passage-way by which they came from the church into this room, but it is shut up now. While we sat waiting in the outer hall upstairs for the janitor to come and show us this room, a bridal couple came down and passed out to their carriage,—plain people of the working class. She wore a black alpaca gown, and had no bridal sign or symptom about her, except the green myrtle wreath on her head. But few brides look happier than she did.

The Rathhaus makes one side of the Market-place, which was, like all market-places, picturesque at eleven in the morning, dirty and dismal at four in the afternoon. I drove through it several times in the course of the forenoon; and at last the women came to know me, and nodded and smiled as we passed. Their hats were wonderful to see,—cocked up on top of a neat white cap, with its frill all at the back and none in front; the hats shaped—well, nobody could say how they were shaped—like half a washbowl bent up, with the little round centre rim left in behind! I wonder if that gives an idea to anybody who has not seen the hat. The real wonder, however, was not in the shape, but in the material. They are made of wood,—actually of wood,—split up into the finest threads, and sewed like straw; and the women make them themselves. All the vegetable women had theirs bound with bright green, with long green loops hanging down behind; but the fishwomen had theirs bound with narrow black binding round the edge, lined with purple calico, and with black ribbon at the back. Finally, after staring a dozen of the good souls out of countenance looking at their heads, I bought one of the bonnets outright! It was the cleanest creature ever seen that sold it to me. She pulled it off her head, and sold it as readily as she would have sold me a dozen eels out of her basket; and I carried it on my arm all the way from Lubeck to Cassel, and from Cassel to Munich, to the great bewilderment of many railway officials and travellers. Before I had concluded my bargain there was a crowd ten deep all around the carriage. Everybody—men, women, children—left their baskets and stalls, and came to look on. I believe I could have bought the entire wardrobe of the whole crowd, if I had so wished,—so eager and pleased did they look, talking volubly with each other, and looking at me. It was a great occasion for Brita, who harangued them all by instalments from the front seat, and explained to them that the bonnet was going all the way to America, and that her "lady" had a great liking for all "national" things, which touched one old lady's patriotism so deeply that she pulled off her white cap and offered it to me, making signs that my wooden bonnet was incomplete without the cap, as it certainly was. On Brita's delicately calling her attention to the fact that her cap was far from clean, she said she would go home and wash it and flute it afresh, if the lady would only buy it; and three hours later she actually appeared with it most exquisitely done up, and not at all dear for the half-dollar she asked for it. After buying this bonnet I drove back to the hotel with it, ate my lunch in the oleander-shaded porch, and then set off again to see the cathedral. This proved to me a far more interesting church than Saint Mary's, though the guide-books say that Saint Mary's is far the finer church of the two. There is enough ugliness in both of them, for that matter, to sink them. But in the cathedral there are some superb bronzes and brasses, and a twisted iron railing around the pulpit, which is so marvellous in its knottings and twistings that a legend has arisen that the devil made it.

"How very much they seem to have made of the devil in the olden time, ma'am, do they not?" remarked Brita, entirely unconscious of the fact that she was philosophizing; "wherever we have been, there have been so many things named in his honor!"

The clock in this church has not been deemed worthy of mention in the guide-books; but it seemed to me far more wonderful than the one at Saint Mary's. I shall never forget it as long as I live; in fact, I fear I shall live to wish I could. The centre of the dial plate is a huge face of gilt, with gilt rays streaming out from it; two enormous eyes in this turn from side to side as the clock ticks, right, left, right, left, so far each time that it is a squint,—a horrible, malignant, diabolical squint. It seems almost irreverent even to tell you that this is to symbolize the never-closing eye of God. The uncanny fascination of these rolling eyes cannot be described. It is too hideous to look at, yet you cannot look away. I sat spellbound in a pew under it for a long time. On the right hand of the clock stands a figure representing the "Genius of Time." This figure holds a gold hammer in its hand, and strikes the quarter-hours. On the other side stands Death,—a naked skeleton,—with an hour-glass. At each hour he turns his hour-glass, shakes his head, and with a hammer in his right hand strikes the hour. I heard him strike "three," and I confess a superstitious horror affected me. The thought of a congregation of people sitting Sunday after Sunday looking at those rolling eyes, and seeing that skeleton strike the hour and turn his hour-glass, is monstrous. Surely there was an epidemic in those middle ages of hideous and fantastic inventions. I am not at all sure that it has not stamped its impress on the physiognomy of the German nation. I never see a crowd of Germans at a railway station without seeing in dozens of faces resemblance to ugly gargoyles. And why should it not have told on them? The women of old Greece brought forth beautiful sons and daughters, it is said, because they looked always on beautiful statues and pictures. The German women have been for a thousand years looking at grotesque and leering or coarse and malignant gargoyles carved everywhere,—on the gateways of their cities, in their churches, on the very lintels of their houses. Why should not the German face have been slowly moulded by these prenatal influences?

Above this malevolent clock was a huge scaffold beam, crossing the entire width of the church, and supporting four huge figures, carved with some skill; the most immodest Adam and Eve I ever beheld; a bishop and a Saint John and a Mary,—these latter kneeling in adoration of a crucifixion above. The whole combination—the guilty Adam and Eve, the pompous bishop, the repulsive crucifixion, the puppet clock with its restless eyes and skeleton, and the loud tick-tock, tick-tock, of the pendulum,—all made up a scene of grotesqueness and irreverence mingled with superstition and devotion, such as could not be found anywhere except in a German church of the twelfth century. It was a relief to turn from it and go into the little chapel, where stands the altar-piece made sacred as well as famous by the hands of that tender spiritual painter, Memling. These altar-pieces look at first sight so much like decorated wardrobes that it is jarring. I wish they had fashioned them otherwise. In this one, for instance, it is almost a pain to see on the outside doors of what apparently is a cupboard one of Memling's angels (the Gabriel) and the Mary listening to his message. Throwing these doors back, you see life-size figures of four saints,—John, Jerome, Blasius, and Ægidius. The latter is a grand dark figure, with a head and face to haunt one. Opening these doors again, you come to the last,—a landscape with the crucifixion in the foreground, and other scenes from the Passion of the Saviour. This is less distinctively Memling-like; in fact, the only ones of them all which one would be willing to say positively no man's hand but Memling's had touched, are the two tender angels in white on the outside shutters.

We left Lubeck very early in the morning. As we drove to the station, the milkmen and milkwomen were coming in, in their pretty carts, full of white wooden firkins, brass bound, with queer long spouts out on one side; brass measures of different sizes, and brass dippers, all shining as if they had been fresh scoured that very morning, made the carts a pretty spectacle. And the last thing of all which I stopped to look at in Lubeck was the best of all,—an old house with a turreted bay-window on the corner, and this inscription on the front between the first and second stories of the house:—

"North and south, the world is wide:

East and west, home is best."

It was in Platt Deutsch; and oddly enough, the servant of the house, who was at the door, did not know what it meant; and the first two men we asked did not know what it meant,—stared at it stupidly, shrugged their shoulders, and shook their heads. It was a lovely motto for a house, but not a good one for wanderers away from home to look at. It brought a sudden sense of homesickness, like an odor of a flower or a bar of music which has an indissoluble link with home.

It took a whole day to go from Lubeck to Cassel, but the day did not seem long. It was a series of pictures, and poor Brita's raptures over it all were at once amusing and pathetic. As soon as we began to see elevated ground, she became excited. "Oh, oh, ma'am," she exclaimed, "talk about scenery in Denmark! It is too flat. I am so used to the flat country, the least hill is beautiful." "Do you not call this grand?" she would say, at the sight of a hill a hundred or two feet high. It was a good lesson of the meaning of the word relative. After all, one can hardly conceive what it must be to live sixty-four years on a dead level of flatness. A genuine mountain would probably be a terror to a person who had led such a life. Brita's face, when I told her that I lived at the foot of mountains more than twelve times as high as any she had seen, was a study for incredulity and wonder. I think she thought I was lying. It was the hay harvest. All the way from Lubeck to Cassel were men and women, all hard at work in the fields; the women swung their scythes as well as the men, but looked more graceful while raking. Some wore scarlet handkerchiefs over their heads, some white; all had bare legs well in sight. At noon we saw them in groups on the ground, and towards night walking swiftly along the roads, with their rakes over their shoulders. I do not understand why travellers make such a to-do always about the way women work in the fields in Germany. I am sure they are far less to be pitied than the women who work in narrow, dark, foul streets of cities; and they look a thousand times healthier. Our road lay for many hours through a beautiful farm country: red brick houses and barns with high thatched roofs, three quarters of the whole building being thatched roof; great sweeps of meadow, tracts of soft pines, kingdoms of beeches,—the whole forest looking like a rich yellow brown moss in the distance, and their mottled trunks fairly shining out in the cross sunbeams, as if painted; wide stretches of brown opens, with worn paths leading off across them; hedges everywhere, and never a fence or a wall; mountain-ash trees, scarlet full; horse-chestnuts by orchards; towns every few minutes, and our train halting at them all long enough for the whole town to make up their minds whether they could go or not, pack their bags, and come on board; bits of marsh, with labyrinths of blue water in and out in it, so like tongues of the sea that, forgetting where I was, I said, "I wonder if that is fresh water." "It must be, ma'am," replied the observant Brita, "inasmuch as the white lilies are floating beautiful and large in it."

"Oh," she suddenly ejaculated, "how strange it was! Napoleon III. he thought he would get a good bit of this beautiful Germany for a birthday present, and be in Berlin on his birthday; and instead of that the Prussians were in Berlin on his birthday."

At LÜneburg we came into the heather. I thought I knew heather, but I was to discover my mistake. All the heather of my life heretofore—English, Scotch, Norwegian—had been no more than a single sprig by the side of this. "The dreary LÜneburg Heath," the discriminating Baedeker calls it. The man who wrote that phrase must have been not only color-blind, he must have been color-dead! If a mountain is "dreary" when it turns purple pink or pink purple five minutes before the rising sun is going to flash full on its eastern front, then the LÜneburg Heath is "dreary." Acres of heather, miles of heather; miles after miles, hour after hour, of swift railroad riding, and still heather! The purple and the pink and the browns into which the purple and pink blended and melted, shifted every second, and deepened and paled in the light and the shadow, as if the earth itself were gently undulating. Two or three times, down vistas among the low birches, I saw men up to their knees in the purple, apparently reaping it with a sickle. A German lady in the car explained that they cut it to strew in the sheep-stalls for the sheep to sleep on, and that the sheep ate it: bed, bed-blanket, and breakfast all in one! Who would not be a sheep? Here and there were little pine groves in this heath; the pine and the birch being the only trees which can keep any footing against heather when it sets out to usurp a territory, and even they cannot grow large or freely. Three storks rose from these downs as we passed, and flew slowly away, their great yellow feet shining as if they had on gold slippers.

"The country people reckon it a great blessing, ma'am, if a stork will build its nest on their roof," said Brita. "I dare say it is thought so in America the same." "No, Brita, we have no storks in America," I said. "I dare say some other bird, then, you hold the same," she replied, in a tone so taking it for granted that no nation of people could be without its sacred domestic bird that I was fain to fall back on the marten as our nearest approach to such a bird; and I said boastfully that we built houses for them in our yards, that they never built on roofs.

At Celle, when she caught sight of the castle where poor Caroline Matilda died, she exclaimed, "Oh, ma'am, that is where our poor queen died. It was the nasty Queen Dowager did it; it was, indeed, ma'am. And the king had opened the ball with her that very night that he signed the order to send her away. They took her in her ball-dress, just as she was. If they had waited till morning the Danes would have torn her out of the wagon, for they worshipped her. She screamed for her baby, and they just tossed it to her in the wagon; and she was only twenty."

Pages of guide-book could not have so emphasized the tragedy of that old gray castle as did Brita's words and her tearful eyes, and "nasty old Queen Dowager." I suppose the truth will never be known about that poor young queen; history whiffles round so from century to century that it seems hardly worth while to mind about it. At any rate, it can't matter much to either Caroline or Struensee, her lover, now.

Cassel at nine o'clock. Friendly faces and voices and hands, and the very air of America in every room. It was like a dream; and like a dream vanished, after twenty-four hours of almost unceasing talk and reminiscence and interchange. "Blessings brighten," even more than "when they take their flight," when they pause in their flight long enough for us to come up with them and take another look at them.

Cassel is the healthiest town in all Germany; and when you see it you do not wonder. High and dry and clear, and several hundred feet up above the plain, it has off-looks to wide horizons in all directions. To the east and south are beautiful curves of high hills, called mountains here; thickly wooded, so that they make solid spaces of color, dark green or purple or blue, according to the time calendar of colors of mountains at a distance. (They have their time-tables as fixed as railway trains, and much more to be depended on.) There is no town in Germany which can compare with Cassel as a home for people wishing to educate children cheaply and well, and not wishing to live in the fashions and ways and close air of cities. It has a picture-gallery second to only one in Germany; it has admirable museums of all sorts; it has a first-rate theatre; good masters in all branches of study are to be had at low rates; living is cheap and comfortable (for Germany). The water is good; the climate also (for Germany); and last, not least, the surrounding country is full of picturesque scenery,—woods, high hills, streams; just such a region as a lover of Nature finds most repaying and enjoyable. In the matter of society, also, Cassel is especially favored, having taken its tone from the days of the Electors, and keeping still much of the old fine breeding of culture and courtesy.

It is a misfortune to want to go from Cassel to Munich in one day. It can be done; but it takes fourteen hours of very hard work,—three changes,—an hour's waiting at one place, and half an hour at another, and the road for the last half of the day so rough that it could honestly be compared to nothing except horseback riding over bowlders at a rapid rate. This is from Gemunden to Munich: if there is any other way of getting there, I think nobody would go by this; so I infer that there is not. You must set off, also, at the unearthly hour of 5 A.M.,—an hour at which all virtues ooze out of one; even honesty out of cabmen, as I found at Cassel, when a man to whom I had paid four marks—more than twice the regular fare—for bringing us a five minutes' distance to the railway station, absolutely had the face to ask three marks more. Never did I so long for a command of the German tongue. I only hope that the docile Brita translated for me literally what I said, as I handed him twelve cents more, with, "I gave one dollar because you had to get up so early in the morning. You know very well that even half that sum is more than the price at ordinary times. I will give you this fifty pfennigs for yourself, and not another pfennig do you get!" I wish that the man that invented the word pfennig had to "do a pour of it for one tousand year," as dear old Dr. PrÖhl said of the teapot that would not pour without spilling. I think it is the test-word of the German language. The nearest direction I could give for pronouncing it would be: fill your mouth with hasty-pudding, then say purr-f-f-f-f-f, and then gulp the pudding and choke when you come to the g,—that's a pfennig; and the idea of such a name as that for a contemptible thing of which it takes one hundred to make a quarter of a dollar! They do them up in big nickel pieces too,—heavy, and so large that in the dark you always mistake them for something else. Ten hundredths of a quarter!—you could starve with your purse loaded down with them.

In the station, trudging about as cheerily as if they were at home, was a poor family,—father, mother, and five little children,—evidently about to emigrate. Each carried a big bundle; even the smallest toddler had her parcel tied up in black cloth with a big cord. The mother carried the biggest bundle of all,—a baby done up in a bedquilt, thick as a comforter; the child's head was pinned in tight as its feet,—not one breath of air could reach it.

"Going to America, ma'am," said Brita, "I think they must be. Oh, ma'am, there was five hundred sailed in one ship for America, last summer,—all to be Mormons; and the big fellow that took them, with his gold spectacles, I could have killed him. They'll be wretched enough when they come to find what they've done. Brigham Young's dead, but there must be somebody in his place that's carrying it on the same. They'd not be allowed to stay in Denmark, ma'am,—oh, no, they've got to go out of the country."

All day again we journeyed through the hay harvest,—the same picturesque farm-houses, with their high roofs thatched or dark-tiled, their low walls white or red or pink, marked off into odd-shaped intervals by lattice-work of wood; no fences, no walls; only the coloring to mark divisions of crops. Town after town snugged round its church; the churches looked like hens with their broods gathered close around them, just ready to go under the wings. We had been told that we need not change cars all the way to Munich; so, of course, we had to change three times,—bundled out at short notice, at the last minute, to gather ourselves up as we might. In one of these hurried changes I dropped my stylographic pen. Angry as I get with the thing when I am writing with it, my very heart was wrung with sorrow at its loss. Without much hope of ever seeing it again, I telegraphed for it. The station-master who did the telegraphing was profoundly impressed by Brita's description of the "wonderful instrument" I had lost. "A self-writing pen,"—she called it. I only wish it were! "You shall hear at the next station if it has been found," he said. Sure enough, at the very next station the guard came to the door. "Found and will be sent," he said; and from that on he regarded me with a sort of awe-stricken look whenever he entered the car. I believe he considered me a kind of female necromancer from America! and no wonder, with two self-writing pens in my possession, for luckily I had my No. 2 in my travelling-bag to show as sample of what I had lost.

At Elm we came into a fine hilly region,—hills that had to be tunnelled or climbed over by zigzags; between them were beautiful glimpses of valleys and streams. Brita was nearly beside herself, poor soul! Her "Oh's" became something tragic. "Oh, ma'am, it needs no judge to see that God has been here!" she cried. "We must think on the Building-Master when we see such scenery as this."

As we came out on the broader plains, the coloring of the villages grew colder; unlatticed white walls, and a colder gray to the roofs, the groups of houses no longer looked like crowds of furry creatures nestled close for protection. Some rollicking school girls, with long hair flying, got into our carriage, and chattered, and ate cake, and giggled; the cars rocked us to and fro on our seats as if we were in a saddle on a run-away horse in a Colorado caÑon. All the rough roads I have ever been on have been smooth gliding in comparison with this. At nine o'clock, Munich, and a note from the dear old "Fraulein" to say that her house was full, but she had rooms engaged for me near by. The next day I went to see her, and found her the same old inimitable dear as ever,—the eyes and the smile not a day older, and the drollery and the mimicry all there; but, alas! old age has come creeping too close not to hurt in some ways, and an ugly rheumatism prevents her from walking and gives her much pain. I had hoped she could go to Oberammergau with me; but it is out of the question. At night she sent over to me the loveliest basket of roses and forget-me-nots and mignonette, with a card, "Good-night, my dear lady,—I kiss you;" and I am not too proud to confess that I read it with tears in my eyes. The dear, faithful, loving soul!

THE VILLAGE OF OBERAMMERGAU.

Mountains and valleys and rivers are in league with the sun and summer—and, for that matter, with winter too—to do their best in the Bavarian Highlands. Lofty ranges, ever green at base, ever white at top, are there tied with luminous bands of meadow into knots and loops, and knots and loops again, tightening and loosening, opening and shutting in labyrinths, of which only rivers know the secret and no man can speak the charm. Villages which find place in lands like these take rank and relation at once with the divine organic architecture already builded; seem to become a part of Nature; appear to have existed as long as the hills or the streams, and to have the same surety of continuance. How much this natural correlation may have had to do with the long, unchanging simplicities of peoples born and bred in these mountain haunts, it would be worth while to analyze. Certain it is that in all peasantry of the hill countries in Europe, there are to be seen traits of countenance and demeanor,—peculiarities of body, habits, customs, and beliefs which are indigenous and lasting, like plants and rocks. Mere lapse of time hardly touches them; they have defied many centuries; only now in the mad restlessness of progress of this the nineteenth do they begin to falter. But they have excuse when Alps have come to be tunnelled and glaciers are melted and measured.

Best known of all the villages that have had the good fortune to be born in the Bavarian Highlands is Oberammergau, the town of the famous Passion Play. But for the Passion Play the great world had never found Oberammergau out, perhaps; yet it might well be sought for itself. It lies 2,600 feet above the sea, at the head of a long stretch of meadow lands, which the River Ammer keeps green for half the year,—at the head of these, and in the gateway of one of the most beautiful walled valleys of the Alps. The Ammer is at once its friend and foe; in summer a friend, but malicious in spring, rising suddenly after great rains or thaws, and filling the valley with a swift sea, by which everything is in danger of being swept away. In 1769 it tore through the village with a flood like a tidal wave, and left only twelve houses standing.

High up on one of the mountain-sides, northeast of the village, is a tiny spot of greensward, near the course of one of the mountain torrents which swell the Ammer. This green spot is the Oberammergauers' safety-gauge. So long as that is green and clear the valley will not be flooded; as soon as the water is seen shining over that spot it is certain that floods will be on in less than an hour, and the whole village is astir to forestall the danger. The high peaks, also, which stand on either side the town, are friend and foe alternately. White with snow till July, they keep stores of a grateful coolness for summer heats; but in winter the sun cannot climb above them till nine o'clock, and is lost in their fastnesses again at one. Terrible hail-storms sometimes whirl down from their summits. On the 10th of May, 1774, there were three of these hail-storms in one day, which killed every green blade and leaf in the fields. One month later, just as vegetation had fairly started again, came another avalanche of hail, and killed everything a second time. On the 13th of June, 1771, snow lay so deep that men drove in sledges through the valley. This was a year never to be forgotten. In 1744 there was a storm of rain, thunder, and lightning, in which the electric fire shot down like javelins into the town, set a score of houses on fire, and destroyed the church. One had need of goodly devotion to keep a composed mind and contented spirit in a dwelling-place surrounded by such dangers. The very elements, however, it seems, are becoming tamed by the inroads of civilization; for it is more than fifty years since Oberammergau has seen such hail or such lightning.

The village is, like all Tyrolean villages, built without apparent plan,—no two houses on a line, no two streets at right angles, everybody's house slanting across or against somebody else's house, the confusion really attaining the dignity of a fine art. If a child were to set out a toy village on the floor, decide hastily to put it back in its box, sweep it all together between his two hands, then change his mind, and let the houses remain exactly as they had fallen, with no change except to set them right side up, I think it would make a good map of Oberammergau. The houses are low, white-plastered, or else left of the natural color of the wood, which, as it grows old, is of a rich dark brown. The roofs project far over the eaves, and are held down by rows of heavy stones to keep them from blowing off in wind-storms. Tiny open-work balconies are twined in and out capriciously, sometimes filled with gay flowers, sometimes with hay and dried herbs, sometimes with the firewood for winter. Oberammergau knows in such matters no law but each man's pleasure. It is at each man's pleasure, also, where he will keep his manure-heap; and usually he elects to keep it close to the street, joining his barn or his house, or his neighbor's barn or house, at convenience. Except that there are many small sluices and rivulets and canals of spring water wandering about the village to carry off the liquidation, this would be intolerable, and surely would create pestilences. As it is, the odors are abominable, and are a perpetual drawback to the delight one would otherwise take in the picturesque little place.

There are many minute gardens and bits of orchard of all possible shapes,—as many and as many-sided as the figures in the first pages of Euclid. I saw one, certainly not containing more than eight square feet, which was seven-sided, fenced and joined to two houses. Purple phlox, dahlias, and lilacs are the favorite out-door flowers. Of these there were clumps and beds which might have been transported from New England. In the balconies and window-sills were scarlet geranium, white alyssum, and pansies.

The most striking natural feature of Oberammergau is the great mountain-peak to the southwest, called the Kofel. This is a bare, rocky peak of singularly bold contour. On its summit is set a large cross, which stands out always against the sky with a clearness almost solemn. The people regard this Kofel as the guardian angel of their village; and it is said that the reply was once made to persons who were urging the Passion Play actors to perform their play in England or America,—

"We would do so if it were possible; but to do that, it would be needful to take the entire village and our guardian spirit, the Kofel."

I arrived in Oberammergau on a Wednesday, and counted on finding myself much welcomed, three days in advance of the day of the play. Never was a greater mistake. A country cousin coming uninvited to make a visit in the middle of a busy housewife's spring house-cleaning would be as welcome. As I drove into the village the expression of things gave me alarm. Every fence, post, roof, bush, had sheets, pillow-cases, or towels drying on it; the porches and grass-plots were strewn with pillows and mattresses; a general fumigation and purification of a quarantined town could not have produced a greater look of being turned wrong side out. This is what the cleanly Oberammergau women do every week during the Passion Play season. It takes all the time intervening between the weekly representations of the play to make ready their bedrooms and beds.

I was destined to greater alarms and surprises, however. The Frau Rutz, to whom I had written for lodgings, and to whose house I drove all confident, had never heard of my name. It became instantaneously apparent to me that I probably represented to her mind perhaps the eleven hundred and thirty-seventh person who had stopped at her door with the same expectation. Half of her house was being re-roofed, "to be done by Sunday;" all her bed-linen was damp in baskets in the kitchen; and she and her sister were even then ironing for dear life to be done in time to begin baking and brewing on the next day. Evidently taking time by the forelock was a good way to come to a dead-lock in Oberammergau. To house after house I drove,—to Frau Zwink's bird-cage, perched on the brink of a narrow canal, and half over it, it seemed. Just before me stood a post-carriage, at Frau Zwink's door; and as I stepped out two English ladies with bags, bundles, and umbrellas disappeared within Frau Zwink's door, having secured the only two available perches in the cage. The Frau came running with urgent solicitations that I should examine a closet she had, which she thought might answer.

"Oh, is she the lady of the house, and she barefoot?" exclaimed my Danish maid, aghast at the spectacle. Yet I afterwards heard that the Frau Zwink's was one of the notably comfortable lodging-places in the town. In another house were shown to us two small dark rooms, to reach which one must climb a ladder out of the common living-room of the family. From house after house came the response, "No rooms; all promised for Saturday." At intervals I drove back to Frau Rutz's for further suggestions. At last she became gradually impressed with a sense of responsibility for our fortunes; and the mystery of her knowing nothing about my letter was cleared up. Her nephew had charge of the correspondence; she never saw the letters; he had not yet had time to answer one half of the letters he had received. Most probably my letter might be in his pocket now. Friendship grew up between my heart and the heart of the Frau Rutz as we talked. Who shall fathom or sound these bonds which create themselves so quickly with one, so slowly with another? She was an Oberammergau peasant, who knew no word of my tongue; I a woman of another race, life, plane, who could not speak one word she could comprehend, and our interpreter was only a servant; but I think I do not exaggerate when I say that the Frau and I became friends. I know I am hers; and I think if I were in Oberammergau in need, I should find that she was mine.

By some unexplained accident (if there be such things) the best room in all Oberammergau was still left free,—a great sunny room, with a south window and east windows, a white porcelain stove, an old-fashioned spinnet, a glass-doored corner-cupboard full of trinkets, old-fashioned looking-glasses, tables, and two good beds; and of this I took possession in incredulous haste. It was in the house of George Lang, merchant, the richest man in the town. The history of the family of which he is now the leading representative is identified with the fortunes of Oberammergau for a century past. It is an odd thing that this little village should have had its line of merchant princes,—a line dating back a hundred years, marked by the same curious points of heredity as that of the Vanderbilts or Astors in America, and the Rothschilds in Europe; men as shrewd, sharp, foreseeing, fore-planning, and executive in their smaller way, and perhaps as arbitrary in their monopolies, as some of our millionnaires.

In 1765 there lived in the service of the monastery at Ettal a man named Joseph Lang. He was a trusted man, a sort of steward and general supervisor. When the monastery was suppressed, Joseph Lang's occupation was gone. He was a handy man, both with tools and with colors, and wandering down to Oberammergau, halted for a little to see if he could work himself in with the industry already established there of toy-making. At first he made simply frames, and of the plainest sort; soon—perhaps from a reverent bias for still ministering to the glory of the church, but probably quite as much from his trader's perception of the value of an assured market—he began to paint wooden figures of saints, apostles, Holy Virgins, and Christs. These figures at first he imported from the Tyrol, painted them, and sent them back there to be sold. Before long he had a large majority of the Oberammergau villagers working under his direction as both carvers and colorers in this business,—a great enlargement of their previous trade of mere toy-making.

This man had eleven sons. Ten of them were carvers in wood, one was a painter and gilder. All these sons worked together in the continuing and building up of their father's business. One of them, George Lang, perceiving the advantage of widening business connections, struck out for the world at large, established agencies for his house in many countries, chiefly in Russia, and came home to die. He had six sons and four or five daughters, it is not certainly known which; for, as the present George Lang said, telling this genealogical history in his delightful English: "The archives went up in fire once, so they did not know exactly." All six of these sons followed the trades of carving, painting, and gilding. One of them, the youngest, Johann, continued the business, succeeding to his father's position in 1824. He was perhaps the cleverest man of the line. He went from country to country, all over Europe, and had his agents in America, England, Australia, Russia. He was on terms of acquaintance with people in high position everywhere, and was sometimes called "The King of Oberammergau." Again and again the villagers wished to make him burgomaster or magistrate, but he would not accept the position. Nevertheless it finally came to pass that all legal writings of the town, leases, conveyances, etc., made, were signed by his name as well as by the names of the recognized officials. First, "the magistracy of Oberammergau," then, "Johann Lang, Agent," as he persisted in calling himself, ran in the records of the parties to transactions in Oberammergau at that time.

In 1847 the village began to be in great trouble. A large part of it was burned; sickness swept it; whole families were homeless, or without father or brother to support them. Now shone out the virtues of this "King of Oberammergau," who would not be its burgomaster. He supported the village: to those who could work he gave work, whether the work had present value to him or not; to those who could not work he gave food, shelter, clothes. He was a rich man in 1847, when the troubles began. In 1849 he was poor, simply from his lavish giving. He had only two sons, to both of whom he gave an education in the law. Thus the spell of the succession of the craft of wood-workers was broken. No doubt ambition had entered into the heart of the "King of Oberammergau" to place his sons higher in the social scale than any success in mere trade could lift them. One of these sons is now burgomaster of the village; he is better known to the outside world as the Caiaphas of the Passion Play. To one knowing the antecedents of his house, the dramatic power with which he assumes and renders the Jewish High-Priest's haughty scorn, impatience of opposition, contempt for the Nazarene, will be seen to have a basis in his own pride of birth and inherited habit of authority.

The other son, having been only moderately successful in making his way in the world as a lawyer, returned to Oberammergau, succeeded to his father's business in 1856, but lived only a short time, dying in 1859. He left a widow and six children,—three sons and three daughters. For a time the widow and a sister-in-law carried on the business. As the sons grew up, two of them gradually assumed more and more the lead in affairs, and now bid fair to revive and restore the old traditions of the family power and success. One of them is in charge of a branch of the business in England, the other in Oberammergau. The third son is an officer in the Bavarian army. The aunt is still the accountant and manager of the house, and the young people evidently defer to her advice and authority.

The daughters have been educated in Munich and at convents, and are gentle, pleasing, refined young women. At the time of the Passion Play in 1880 they did the honors of their house to hundreds of strangers, who were at once bewildered and delighted to find, standing behind their chairs at dinner, young women speaking both English and French, and as courteously attentive to their guests' every wish as if they had been extending the hospitality of the "King of Oberammergau," a half-century back.

Their house is in itself a record. It stands fronting an irregular open, where five straggling roadways meet, making common centre of a big spring, from which water runs ceaselessly day and night into three large tanks. The house thus commands the village, and it would seem no less than natural that all post and postal service should centre in it. It is the largest and far the best house in the place. Its two huge carved doors stand wide open from morning till night, like those of an inn. On the right-hand side of the hall is the post-office, combined with which is the usual universal shop of a country village, holding everything conceivable, from a Norway dried herring down to French sewing-silk. On the left-hand side are the warerooms of wood-carvings: the first two rooms for their sale; behind these, rooms for storing and for packing the goods, to send away; there are four of these rooms, and their piled-up cases bear testimony to the extent of the business they represent.

A broad, dark, winding stairway leads up to the second floor. Here are the living-rooms of the family; spacious, sunny, comfortable. At the farther end of this hall a great iron door leads into the barn; whenever it is opened, a whiff of the odor of hay sweeps through; and to put out your head from your chamber-door of a morning, and looking down the hall, to see straight into a big haymow, is an odd experience the first time it happens. The house faces southeast, and has a dozen windows, all the time blazing in sunlight,—a goodly thing in Oberammergau, where shadow and shade mean reeking damp and chill. On the south side of the house is an old garden, chiefly apple-orchard; under these trees, in sunny weather, the family take their meals, and at the time of the Passion Play more than fifty people often sat down at outdoor tables there. These trees were like one great aviary, so full were they of little sparrow-like birds, with breasts of cinnamon brown color, and black crests on their heads. They chatted and chattered like magpies, and I hardly ever knew them to be quiet except for a few minutes every morning, when, at half-past five, the village herd of fifty cows went by, each cow with a bell at her neck; and all fifty bells half ringing, half tolling, a broken, drowsy, sleepy, delicious chime, as if some old sacristan, but half awake, was trying to ring a peal. At the first note of this the birds always stopped,—half envious, I fancied. As the chime died away, they broke out again as shrill as ever, and even the sunrise did not interrupt them.

The open square in front of the house is a perpetual stage of tableaux. The people come and go, and linger there around the great water-tanks as at a sort of Bethesda, sunk to profaner uses of every-day cleansing. The commonest labors become picturesque performed in open air, with a background of mountains, by men and women with bare heads and bare legs and feet. Whenever I looked out of my windows I saw a picture worth painting. For instance, a woman washing her windows in the tanks, holding each window under the running stream, tipping it and turning it so quickly in the sunshine that the waters gliding off it took millions of prismatic hues, till she seemed to be scrubbing with rainbows; another with two tubs full of clothes, which she had brought there to wash, her petticoat tucked up to her knees, her arms bare to the shoulder, a bright red handkerchief knotted round her head, and her eyes flashing as she beat and lifted, wringing and tossing the clothes, and flinging out a sharp or a laughing word to every passer; another coming home at night with a big bundle of green grass under one arm, her rake over her shoulder, a free, open glance, and a smile and a bow to a gay postilion watering his horses; another who had brought, apparently, her whole stock of kitchen utensils there to be made clean,—jugs and crocks, and brass pans. How they glittered as she splashed them in and out! She did not wipe them, only set them down on the ground to dry, which seemed likely to leave them but half clean, after all. Then there came a dashing young fellow from the Tyrol, with three kinds of feathers in his green hat, short brown breeches, bare knees, gray yarn stockings with a pattern of green wreath knit in at the top, a happy-go-lucky look on his face, stooping down to take a mouthful of the swift-running water from the spout, and getting well splashed by missing aim with his mouth, to the uproarious delight of two women just coming in from their hay-making in the meadows, one of them balancing a hay-rake and pitchfork on her shoulder with one hand, and with the other holding her dark-blue petticoat carefully gathered up in front, full of hay; the other drawing behind her (not wheeling it) a low, scoop-shaped wheelbarrow full of green grass and clover,—these are a few of any day's pictures. And thither came every day Issa Kattan, from Bethlehem of JudÆa,—a brown-skinned, deer-eyed Syrian, who had come all the way from the Holy Land to offer to the Passion Play pilgrims mother-of-pearl trinkets wrought in Jerusalem; rosaries of pearl, of olive-wood, of seeds, scarlet, yellow, and black, wonderfully smooth, hard, and shining. He wore a brilliant red fez, and told his gentle lies in a voice as soft as the murmuring of wind in pines. He carried his wares in a small tray, hung, like a muff, by a cord round his neck, the rosaries and some strips of bright stuffs hanging down at each side and swinging back and forth in time to his slow tread. Issa paced the streets patiently from morn till night, but took good care to be at this watering-place many times in the course of the day, chiefly at the morning, and when the laborers were coming home at sunset.

Another vender, as industrious as he, but less picturesque, also haunted the spot: a man who, knowing how dusty the Passion Play pilgrims would be, had brought brushes to sell,—brushes big, little, round, square, thick, thin, long, short, cheap, dear, good, bad, and indifferent; no brush ever made that was not to be found hanging on that man's body, if you turned him round times enough. That was the way he carried his wares,—in tiers, strings, strata, all tied together and on himself in some inexplicable way. One would think he must have slipped himself into a dozen "cat's-cradles" of twine to begin with, and then had the brushes netted in and out on this foundation. All that remained to be seen of him was his head, above this bristling ball, and his feet shuffling below. To cap the climax of his grotesqueness, he wore on his back a wooden box, shaped like an Indian pappoose frame; and in this stood three or four lofty long-handled brushes for sweeping, which rose far above his head.

Another peasant woman—a hay-maker—I remember, who came one night; never again, though I watched longingly for her, or one like her. She wore a petticoat of umber-brown, a white blouse, a blue apron, a pink-and-white handkerchief over her head, pinned under her chin; under one arm she carried a big bunch of tall green grasses, with the tasselled heads hanging loose far behind her. On the other shoulder rested her pitchfork, and in the hand that poised the pitchfork she held a bunch of dahlias, red, white, and yellow.

But the daintiest and most memorable figure of all that flitted or tarried here, was a little brown-eyed, golden-haired maiden, not more than three years old. She lived near by, and often ran away from home. I saw her sometimes led by the hand, but oftenest without guide or protector,—never alone, however; for, rain or shine, early or late, she carried always in her arms a huge puppet, with a face bigger than her own. It wore a shawl and a knit hood, the child herself being always bareheaded. It was some time before I could fathom the mystery of this doll, which seemed shapeless yet bulky, and heavier than the child could well lift, though she tugged at it faithfully and with an expression of care, as we often see poor babies in cities lugging about babies a little younger than themselves. At last I caught the puppet out one day without its shawl, and the mystery was revealed. It was a milliner's bonnet-block, on which a face had been painted. No wonder it seemed heavy and shapeless; below the face was nothing but a rough base of wood. It appeared that as soon as the thing was given to the child, she conceived for it a most inconvenient and unmanageable affection,—would go nowhere without it, would not go to sleep without it, could hardly be induced to put it for one moment out of her tired little arms, which could hardly clasp it round. It seemed but a fitting reward to perpetuate some token of such faithfulness; and after a good deal of pleading I induced the child's aunt, in whose charge she lived, to bring her to be photographed with her doll in her arms. It was not an easy thing to compass this; for the only photographer of the town, being one of the singers in the chorus, had small leisure for the practice of his trade in the Passion Play year; but, won over by the novelty of the subject, he found an odd hour for us, and made the picture. The little thing was so frightened at the sight of the strange room and instruments that she utterly refused to stand alone for a second, which was not so much of a misfortune as I thought at first, for it gave me the aunt's face also; and a very characteristic Oberammergau face it is.

At the same time I also secured a photograph of the good Frau Rutz. It was an illustration of the inborn dramatic sense in the Oberammergau people, that when I explained to Frau Rutz that I wished her to sit for a picture of an Oberammergau woman at her carving, she took the idea instantly, and appeared prompt to the minute, with a vase of her own carving, her glue-pot, and all her tools, to lay on the table by her side. "Do you not think it would be better with these?" she said simply; then she took up her vase and tool, as if to work, seated herself at the table in a pose which could not be improved, and looked up with, "Is this right?" The photographer nodded his head, and, presto! in five seconds it was done; and Frau Rutz had really been artist of her own picture. The likeness did her less than justice. Her face is even more like an old Memling portrait than is the picture. Weather-beaten, wrinkled, thin,—as old at forty-five as it should be by rights at sixty,—hers is still a noble and beautiful countenance. Nothing would so surprise Frau Rutz as to be told this. She laughed and shook her head when, on giving her one of the photographs, I said how much I liked it. "If it had another head on it, it might be very good," she said. She is one of the few women in Oberammergau who do delicate carving. In the previous winter she had made thirty vases of this pattern, besides doing much other work.

Very well I came to know Frau Rutz's chiselled and expressive old face before I left Oberammergau. The front door of her house stood always open; and in a tiny kitchen opposite it,—a sort of closet in the middle of the house, lighted only by one small window opening into the hall, and by its door, which was never shut,—she was generally to be seen stirring or skimming, or scouring her bright saucepans. Whenever she saw us, she ran out with a smile, and the inquiry if there was anything she could do for us. On the day before the Passion Play she opened her little shop. It was about the size of a steamboat stateroom, built over a bit of the sidewalk,—Oberammergau fashion,—and joined at a slant to the house; it was a set of shelves roofed over, and with a door to lock at night, not much more: eight people crowded it tight; but it was packed from sill to roof with carvings, a large part of which had been made by herself, her husband and sons, or workmen in their employ, and most of which, I think, were sold by virtue of the Frau's smile, if it proved as potent a lure to other buyers as to me. If I drove or walked past her house without seeing it, I felt as if I had left something behind for which I ought to go back; and when she waved her hand to us, and stood looking after us as our horses dashed round the corner, I felt that good luck was invoked on the drive and the day.

Driving out of Oberammergau, there are two roads to choose from,—one up the Ammer, by way of a higher valley, and into closer knots of mountains, and so on into the Tyrol; the other down the Ammer, through meadows, doubling and climbing some of the outpost mountains of the range, and so on out to the plains. On the first road lies Ettal, and on the other Unterammergau, both within so short a distance of Oberammergau that they are to be counted in among its pleasures.

Ettal is one of the twelve beautiful houses which the ecclesiastics formerly owned in this part of Bavaria. These old monks had a quick eye for beauty of landscape, as well as a shrewd one for all other advantages of locality; and in the days of their power and prosperity they so crowded into these South Bavarian highlands that the region came to be called "Pfaffenwinkel," or "The Priest's Corner." Abbeys, priories, and convents—a dozen of them, all rich and powerful—stood within a day's journey of one another. Of these, Ettal was pre-eminent for beauty and splendor. It was founded early in the fourteenth century by a German emperor, who, being ill, was ready to promise anything to be well again, and being approached at this moment by a crafty Benedictine, promised to found a Benedictine monastery in the valley of the Ammer, if the Holy Virgin would restore him to health. An old tradition says that as the emperor came riding up the steep Ettaler Berg, at the summit of which the monastery stands, his horse fell three times on his knees, and refused to go farther. This was construed to be a sign from heaven to point out the site of the monastery. But to all unforewarned travellers who have approached Oberammergau by way of Ettal, and been compelled to walk up the Ettaler Berg, there will seem small occasion for any suggestion of a supernatural cause for the emperor's horse tumbling on his knees. A more unmitigated two miles of severe climb was never built into a road; the marvel is that it should have occurred to mortal man to do it, and that there is as yet but one votive tablet by the roadside in commemoration of death by apoplexy in the attempt to walk up. It was Alois Pfaurler who did thus die in July, 1866,—and before he was half-way up, too. Therefore this tablet on the spot of his death has a depressing effect on people for the latter half of their struggle, and no doubt makes them go slower.

How much the Benedictines of Ettal had to do with the Passion Play which has made Oberammergau so famous, it is now not possible to know. Those who know most about it disagree. In 1634, the year in which the play was first performed, it is certain that the Oberammergau community must have been under the pastoral charge of some one of the great ecclesiastical establishments in that region; and it is more than probable that the monks, who were themselves much in the way of writing and performing in religious plays, first suggested to the villagers this mode of working for the glory and profit of the Church.

Their venerable pastor, Daisenberger, to whom they owe the present version of the Passion Play, was an Ettal monk; and one of the many plays which he has arranged or written for their dramatic training is "The Founding of the Monastery of Ettal." The closing stanzas of this well express the feeling of the Oberammergauer to-day, and no doubt of the Ettal monk centuries ago, in regard to the incomparable Ammer Thal region:—

Most travellers who visit Oberammergau know nothing of Unterammergau, except that the white and brown lines of its roofs and spires make a charming dotted picture on the Ammer meadows, as seen from the higher seats in the Passion Play theatre. The little hamlet is not talked about, not even in guide-books. It sits, a sort of Cinderella, and meekly does its best to take care of the strangers who come grumbling to sleep there, once in ten years, only because beds are not to be had in its more favored sister village farther up the stream. Yet it is no less picturesque, and a good deal cleaner, than is Oberammergau; gets hours more of sunshine, a freer sweep of wind, and has compassing it about a fine stretch of meadow-lands, beautiful to look at, and rich to reap.

Its houses are, like those in Oberammergau, chiefly white stucco over stone, or else dark and painted wood, often the lower story of white stucco and the upper one of dark wood, with a fringe of balconies, dried herbs, and wood-piles where the two stories join. Many of the stuccoed houses are gay with Scripture frescos, more than one hundred years old, and not faded yet. There are also many of the curious ancient windows, made of tiny round panes set in lead. When these are broken, square panes have to be set in. Nobody can make the round ones any more. On the inside of the brown wooden shutters are paintings of bright flowers; over the windows, and above the doors, are also Scripture frescos. One old house is covered with them. One scene is Saint Francis lying on his back, with his cross by his side; and another, the coronation of the Virgin Mary, in which God the Father is represented as a venerable man wrapped in a red and yellow robe, with a long white beard, resting his hand on the round globe, while Christ, in a red mantle, is putting the crown on the head of Mary, who is resplendent in bright blue and red. On another wall is Saint Joseph, holding the infant Christ on his knee. There must have been a marvellous secret in the coloring of these old frescos, that they have so long withstood the snows, rains, and winds of the Ammer valley. The greater part of them were painted by one Franz Zwink, in the middle of the last century. The peasants called him the "wind painter," because he worked with such preternatural rapidity. Many legends attest this; among others, a droll one of his finding a woman at her churning one day and asking her for some butter. She refused. "If you'll give me that butter," said Zwink, "I'll paint a Mother of God for you above your door." "Very well; it is a bargain," said the woman, "provided the picture is done as soon as the butter," whereupon Zwink mounted to the wall, and, his brushes flying as fast as her churn dasher, lo! when the butter was done, there shone out the fresh Madonna over the door, and the butter had been fairly earned. Zwink was an athletic fellow, and walked as swiftly as he painted; gay, moreover, for there is a tradition of his having run all the way to Munich once for a dance. Being too poor to hire a horse, he ran thither in one day, danced all night, and the next day ran back to Oberammergau, fresh and merry. He was originally only a color-rubber in the studio of one of the old rococo painters; but certain it is that he either stole or invented a most triumphant system of coloring, whose secret is unknown to-day. It is said that in 1790 every house in both Ober and Unter Ammergau was painted in this way. But repeated fires have destroyed many of the most valuable frescos, and many others have been ruthlessly covered up by whitewash. An old history of the valley says that when the inhabitants saw flames consuming these sacred images, they wept aloud in terror and grief, not so much for the loss of their dwellings as for the irreparable loss of the guardian pictures. The effect of these on a race for three generations,—one after another growing up in the habit, from earliest infancy, of gazing on the visible representations of God and Christ and the Mother of God, placed as if in token of perpetual presence and protection on the very walls and roofs of their homes—must be incalculably great. Such a people would be religious by nature, as inherently and organically as they were hardy of frame by reason of the stern necessities of their existence. It is a poor proof of the superiority of enlightened, emancipated, and cultivated intellect, with all its fine analyses of what God is not, if it tends to hold in scorn or dares to hold in pity the ignorance which is yet so full of spirituality that it believes it can even see what God is, and feels safer by night and day with a cross at each gable of the roof.

One of the Unterammergau women, seeing me closely studying the frescos on her house, asked me to come in, and with half-shy hospitality, and a sort of childlike glee at my interest, showed me every room. The house is one of some note, as note is reckoned in Unterammergau: it was built in 1700, is well covered with Zwink's frescos, and bears an inscription stating that it was the birthplace of one "Max Anrich, canon of St. Zeno." It is the dwelling now of only humble people, but has traces of better days in the square-blocked wooden ceilings and curious old gayly-painted cupboards. Around three sides of the living-room ran a wooden bench, which made chairs a superfluous luxury. In one corner, on a raised stone platform, stood a square stove, surrounded by a broad bench; two steps led up to this bench, and from the bench, two steps more to the lower round of a ladder-like stair leading to the chamber overhead. The kitchen had a brick floor, worn and sunken in hollows; the stove was raised up on a high stone platform, with a similar bench around it, and the woman explained that to sit on this bench with your back to the fire was a very good thing to do in winter. Every nook, every utensil, was shining clean. In one corner stood a great box full of whetstones, scythe-sharpeners; the making of these was the industry by which the brothers earned the most of their money, she said; surely very little money, then, must come into the house. There were four brothers, three sisters, and the old mother, who sat at a window smiling foolishly all the time, aged, imbecile, but very happy. As we drove away, one of the sisters came running with a few little blossoms she had picked from her balcony; she halted, disappointed, and too shy to offer them, but her whole face lighted up with pleasure as I ordered the driver to halt that I might take her gift. She little knew that I was thinking how much the hospitality of her people shamed the cold indifference of so-called finer breeding.

A few rods on, we came to a barn, in whose open doorway stood two women threshing wheat with ringing flails. Red handkerchiefs twisted tight round their heads and down to their eyebrows, barefooted, bare-legged, bare-armed to the shoulders, swinging their flails lustily, and laughing as they saw me stop my horses to have a better look at them; they made one of the vividest pictures I saw in the Ammer valley. Women often are hired there for this work of threshing, and they are expected to swing flails with that lusty stroke all day long for one mark.

THE PASSION PLAY AT OBERAMMERGAU.

The stir the Passion Play brings does not begin in Oberammergau till the Friday afternoon before the Sabbath of the play. Then, gradually, as a hum begins and swells in a disturbed hive of bees, begins and swells the bustle of the incoming of strangers into the little place. By sunset the crooked lanes and streets are swarming with people who have all fancied they were coming in good season before the crowd. The open space in front of George Lang's house was a scene for a painter as the sun went down on Friday, Sept. 5, 1880. The village herd of cows was straggling past on its easy homeward way, the fifty bells tinkling even more sleepily than in the morning; a little goat-herd, with bright brown eyes, and bright brown partridge feathers in his hat, was worrying his little flock of goats along in the jam; vehicles of all sorts,—einspanners, diligences, landaus,—all pulling, twisting, turning, despairing, were trying to go the drivers did not know where, and were asking the way helplessly of each other. To heighten the confusion, a load of hay upset in the middle of the crowd. Twenty shoulders were under it in a twinkling, and the cart was rolled on, limping, on three wheels, friendly hands holding up the corner. Thirty-four vehicles, one after another, halted in front of George Lang's door. Out of many of them the occupants jumped confidently, looking much satisfied at sight of so comfortable a house, and presenting little slips of white paper consigning them to Mr. Lang's care. Much crestfallen, they re-entered their vehicles, to be driven to the quarters reserved for them elsewhere. Some argued; some grumbled; some entreated: all in vain. The decrees of the house of Lang are like those of the Medes and Persians.

It was long after midnight before the sound of wheels and voices and the cracks of postilions' whips ceased under my windows; and it began again before daylight the next morning. All was hurry and stir,—crowds going to the early mass; still greater crowds, with anxious faces, besieging the doors of the building where were to be issued the numbered tickets for seats at the Play; more crowds coming in, chiefly pedestrians; peasant men and women in all varieties and colors of costume; Englishmen in natty travelling-clothes, with white veils streaming from their hats; Roman Catholic priests in squads, their square-brimmed hats and high black coats white with dust. Eager, intent, swift, by hundreds and hundreds they poured in. Without seeing it, one can never realize what a spectacle is produced by this rushing in of six thousand people into a little town in the space of thirty-six hours. There can be nothing like it except in the movements of armies. Being in the streets was like being in a chorus or village-fair scene on an opera stage a mile big, and crowded full from corner to corner. The only thing to do was to abandon one's self to currents, like a ship afloat, and drift, now down this street and now down that, now whirl into an eddy and come to a stop, and now hurry purposelessly on, just as the preponderating push might determine. Mingled up in it all, in everybody's way and under all the horses' feet, were dozens of little mites of Oberammergauers, looking five, six, seven years of age, like lost children, offering for sale "books of the Passion Play." Every creature above the age of an infant is busy at this time in other ways in Oberammergau; so it is left for the babies to hawk the librettos round the streets, and very shrewdly they do it. Little tots that are trusted with only one book at a time,—all they can carry,—as soon as it is sold, grab the pennies in chubby hands and toddle home after another.

As the day wore on, the crowd and the hum of it increased into a jam and a racket. By four o'clock it was a din of wheels, cracking whips, and postilions' cries. Great diligences, loaded down till they squeaked and groaned on their axles; hay-wagons of all sizes, rigged with white cloth stretched on poles for a cover, and rough planks fastened to the sides for seats, came in procession, all packed with the country people; hundreds of shabby einspanners, bringing two or three, and sometimes a fourth holding on behind with dangling feet; fine travelling-carriages of rich people, their postilions decked in blue and silver, with shining black hats, and brass horns swung over their shoulders by green and white cords and tassels,—on they came into the twist and tangle, making it worse, minute by minute.

Most remarkable among all the remarkable costumes to be seen was that of an old woman from Dachau. She was only a peasant, but she was a peasant of some estate and degree. She had come as escort and maid for four young women belonging to a Roman Catholic institution, and wearing its plain uniform. The contrast between the young ladies' conventional garb of black and white and the blazing toilet of their guide and protector was ludicrous. She wore a jacket of brocade stiff with red, green, and silver embroidery; the sleeves puffed out big at the shoulder, straight and tight below to the wrist. It came down behind only a little lower than her shoulder-blades, and it was open in front from the throat to the waist-belt, showing beneath a solid mass of gold and silver braid. Nine enormous silver buttons were sewed on each side the fronts; a scarf of soft black silk was fastened tight round her throat by a superb silver ornament, all twists and chains and disks. Her black woollen petticoat was laid in small, close flutings, straight from belt to hem, edged with scarlet, and apparently was stiff enough to stand alone. It was held out from her body, just below the belt, by a stiff rope coil underneath it, making a tight, hard, round ridge just below her waist, and nearly doubling her apparent size. All the women in Dachau must be as "thick" as that, she said; and "lovers must have long arms to reach round them!" The jacket, petticoat, and scarf, and all her ornaments, had belonged to her grandmother. What a comment on the quality of the fabrics and the perpetuity of a fashion! She was as elegant to-day as her ancestor had been nearly a century before her. On her head she wore a structure of brocaded black ribbon, built up into high projecting horns or towers, and floating in streamers behind. As she herself was nearly six feet tall, this shining brocade fortress on the top of her head moved about above the heads of the crowd like something carried aloft for show in a procession.

Another interesting sight was the peasants who had come bringing edelweiss and blue gentians to sell,—great bunches of the lovely dark blue chalices, drooping a little, but wonderfully fresh to have come two days, or even three, from home; the edelweiss blossoms were there by sheaves, and ten pfennigs a flower seemed none too much to pay to a man who had climbed among dangerous glaciers to pick it, and had walked three whole days to bring it to market.

The very poor people, who had walked, were the most interesting. They came in groups, evidently families, two women to one man; carrying their provisions in baskets, bundles, or knapsacks; worn and haggard with dust and fatigue, but wearing a noticeable look of earnestness, almost of exaltation. Many of them had walked forty or fifty miles; they had brought only black bread to eat; they would sleep the two nights on hay in some barn,—those of them who had had the great good fortune to secure such a luxury; the rest—and that meant hundreds—would sit on the ground anywhere where they could find a spot clear and a rest for their heads; and after two nights and a day of this, they trudged back again their forty miles or fifty, refreshed, glad, and satisfied for the rest of their lives. This is what the Passion Play means to the devout, ignorant Catholic peasant of Bavaria to-day, and this is what it has meant to his race for hundreds of years.

The antagonism and enlightenment of the Reformation did not reach the Bavarian peasant,—did not so much as disturb his reverence for the tangible tokens and presentations of his religion. He did not so much as know when miracle plays were cast out and forbidden in other countries. But it was sixty-one years later than this that the Oberammergau people, stricken with terror at a plague in their village, knew no better device to stay it than to vow to God the performance of a Play of the Divine Passion of Christ. It is as holy a thing to the masses of them now as it was then; and no one can do justice to the play, even as a dramatic spectacle, who does not look at it with recognition of this fact.

The early history of the Play itself is not known. The oldest text-book of it now extant bears the date 1662,—nearly a generation later than the first performance of it in Oberammergau. This manuscript is still in possession of the Lang family, and is greatly amusing in parts. The prologue gives an account of the New Testament plan of salvation, and exhorts all people to avail themselves of it with gratitude and devotion. At this juncture in rushes a demon messenger from the devil, bearing a letter, which he unfolds and reads. In this letter the devil requests all the people not to yield to the influence of this play, asks them to make all the discordant noises they can while it is going on, and promises to reward them well if they will do so. The letter is signed: "I, Lucifer, Dog of Hell, in my hellish house, where the fire pours out of the windows." The demon, having read the letter aloud, folds it up and addresses the audience, saying: "Now you have heard what my master wishes. He is a very good master, and will reward you! Hie, Devil! up and away!" with which he leaps off the stage, and the play at once begins, opening with a scene laid in Bethany,—a meeting between Christ and his disciples. These grotesque fancies, quips, and cranks were gradually banished from the Play. Every year it was more or less altered, priest after priest revising or rewriting it, down to the time of the now venerable Daisenberger, who spent his youth in the monastery of Ettal, and first saw the Passion Play acted at Oberammergau in 1830.

In 1845 the Oberammergau people, in unanimous enthusiasm, demanded to have Daisenberger appointed as their pastor. He at once identified himself warmly with the dramatic as well as the spiritual life of the community; and it is to his learning and skill that the final admirable form of the Passion Play, and the villagers' wonderful success in rendering it, are due. He has written many Biblical dramas and historical plays founded on incidents in the history of Bavaria. Chief among these are: "The Founding of the Monastery of Ettal," "Theolinda," "King Heinrich and Duke Arnold of Bavaria," "Otto Von Wittelsbach at the Veronese Hermitage," "The Bavarians in the Peasants' War," "Luitberge, Duchess of Bavaria." He has also dramatized some of the legends of the saints, and has translated the "Antigone" of Sophocles and arranged it for the Oberammergau stage. A half-century's training under the guidance of so learned and dramatic a writer, who added to his learning and fine dramatic faculty a profound spirituality and passionate adherence to the faiths and dogmas of the Church, might well create, in a simple religious community, a capacity and a fervor even greater than have been shown by the Oberammergau people. To understand the extent and the method of their attainment, it is needful to realize all this; but no amount of study of the details of the long process can fully convey or set forth the subtle influences which must have pervaded the very air of the place during these years. The acting of plays has been not only the one recreation of their life, otherwise hard-worked, sombre, and stern,—it has been their one channel for the two greatest passions of the human heart,—love of approbation and the instinct of religious worship; for the Oberammergau peasant, both these passions have centred on and in his chance to win fame, please his priest, and honor God, by playing well some worthy part in the Passion Play. The hope and the ambition for this have been the earliest emotions roused in the Oberammergau child's breast. In the tableaux of the Play even very young children take part, and it is said that it has always been the reward held up to them as soon as they could know what the words meant: "If thou art good, thou mayest possibly have the honor of being selected to play in the Passion Play when the year comes round." Not to be considered fit to take any part in the Play is held, in Oberammergau, to be disgrace; while to be regarded as worthy to render the part of the Christus is the greatest honor which a man can receive in this world. To take away from an actor a part he has once played is a shame that can hardly be borne; and it is on record that once a man to whom this had happened sank into a melancholy which became madness.

When the time approaches for the choice of the actors and the assignment of the parts, the whole village is in a turmoil. The selections and assignments are made by a committee of forty-five, presided over by the priest and by the venerable "Geistlicher Rath" Daisenberger, who, now in his eightieth year, still takes the keenest interest in all the dramatic performances of his pupils. The election day is in the last week of December of the year before the Play; and the members of the committee, before going to this meeting, attend a mass in the church. The deciding as to the players for 1880 took three days' time, and great heart-burnings were experienced in the community. In regard to the half-dozen prominent parts there is rarely much disagreement; but as there are some seven hundred actors required for the Play, there must inevitably be antagonisms and jealousies among the minor characters. However, when the result of the discussions and votes of the committee is made public, all dissension ceases. One of the older actors is appointed to take charge of the rehearsals, and from his authority there is no appeal. Each player is required to rehearse his part four times a week; and as early in the spring as the snow is out of the theatre the final rehearsals begin. Thus each Passion Play year is a year of very hard work for the Oberammergauers. Except for their constant familiarity with stage routine and unbroken habit of stage representation through the intervening years, they would never be able to endure the strain of the Passion Play summers; and as it is, they look wan and worn before the season is ended.

It is a thankless return that they have received at the hands of some travellers, who have seen in the Passion Play little more than a show of mountebanks acting for money. The truth is that the individual performers receive an incredibly small share of the profits of the Play. There is not another village in the world whose members would work so hard, and at so great personal sacrifice, for the good of their community and their Church. Every dollar of the money received goes into the hands of a committee selected by the people. After all the costs are paid, the profits are divided into four portions: one quarter is set aside to be expended for the Church, for the school, and for the poor; another for the improvement of the village, for repairs of highways, public buildings, etc.; a third is divided among the tax-paying citizens of the town who have incurred the expense of preparing for the Play, buying the costumes, etc. The remaining quarter is apportioned among the players, according to the importance of their respective parts; as there are seven hundred of them, it is easy to see that the individual gains cannot be very great.

The music of the Play, as now performed, was written in 1814, by Rochus Dedler, an Oberammergau schoolmaster. It has for many years been made a sine qua non of this position in Oberammergau that the master must be a musician, and, if possible, a composer; and Dedler is not the only composer who has been content in the humble position of schoolmaster in this village of peasants. Every day the children are drilled in chorus singing and in recitative; with masses and other church music they are early made familiar. Thus is every avenue of training made to minister to the development of material for the perfection of the Passion Play.

Dedler is said to have been a man of almost inspired nature. He wrote often by night, and with preternatural rapidity. The music of the Passion Play was begun on the evening of Trinity Sunday; he called his six children together, made them kneel in a circle around him, and saying, "Now I begin," ordered them all to devote themselves to earnest prayer for him that he might write music worthy of the good themes of the Play. The last notes were written on the following Christmas Day, and they are indeed worthy of the story for which they are at once the expression and the setting. The harmonies are dignified, simple, and tender, with movements at times much resembling some of Mozart's Masses. Many of the chorals are full of solemn beauty. A daughter of Dedler's is still living in Munich; and to her the grateful and honest-minded Oberammergau people have sent, after each performance of the Passion Play, a sum of money in token of their sense of indebtedness to her father's work.

The Passion Play cannot be considered solely as a drama; neither is it to be considered simply as a historical panorama, presenting the salient points in the earthly career of Jesus called Christ. To consider it in either of these ways, or to behold it in the spirit born of either of these two views, is to do only partial justice to it. Whatever there might have been in the beginning of theatrical show and diversion and fantastic conceit about it, has been long ago eliminated. Generation after generation of devout and holy men have looked upon it more and more as a vehicle for the profoundest truths of their religion, and have added to it, scene by scene, speech by speech, everything which in their esteem could enhance its solemnity and make clear its teaching. However much one may disagree with its doctrines, reject its assumptions, or question its interpretations, that is no reason for overlooking its significance as a tangible and rounded presentation of that scheme of the redemption of the world in which to-day millions of men and women have full faith. It is by no means distinctively a Roman Catholic presentation of this scheme; it is Christian. The Holy Virgin of the Roman Catholic Church is, in this play, from first to last, only the mother of Jesus,—the mother whom all lovers and followers of Jesus, wherever they place him or her, however they define his nature and her relations to him, yet hold blessed among the women who have given birth to leaders and saviors of men.

This presentation of the scheme of redemption seeks to portray not only the scenes of the life of Jesus on earth, but the typical foreshadowing of it in the Old Testament narratives,—its prophecy as well as its fulfilment. To this end there are given, before each act of the Play, tableaux of Old Testament events, supposed to be directly typical, and intended to be prophetic, of the scenes in Christ's life which are depicted in the act following. These are selected with skill, and rendered with marvellous effect. For instance, a tableau of the plotting of Joseph's brethren to sell him into Egypt, is given before the act in which the Jewish priests in the full council of the Sanhedrim plot the death of Jesus; a tableau of the miraculous fall of manna for the Israelites in the wilderness, before the act in which is given Christ's Last Supper with his Disciples; the sale of Joseph to the Midianites before the bargain of Judas with the priests for the betrayal of Jesus; the death of Abel, and Cain's despair, before the act in which Judas, driven mad by remorse, throws down at the feet of the priests the "price of blood," and rushes out to hang himself; Daniel defending himself to Darius, before the act in which Jesus is brought into the presence of Pilate for trial; the sacrifice of Isaac, before the scourging of Jesus and his crowning with the thorns: these are a few of the best and most relevant ones.

The Play is divided into eighteen acts, and covers the time from Christ's entry into Jerusalem at the time of his driving the money-changers out of the temple till his ascension. The salient points, both historical and graphic, are admirably chosen for a continuous representation. In the second act is seen the High Council of the Jewish Sanhedrim plotting measures for the ruin and death of Jesus. This is followed by his Departure from Bethany, the Last Journey to Jerusalem, the Last Supper, the Final Interview between Judas and the Sanhedrim, the Betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The performance of the Play up to this point consumes four hours; and as there is here a natural break in the action, an interval of an hour's rest is taken. It comes none too soon, either to actors or spectators, after so long a strain of unbroken attention and deep emotion.

The next act is the bringing of Jesus before the High-Priest Annas; Annas orders him taken before Caiaphas, and this is the ninth act of the Play. Then follow: The Despair of Judas and his Bitter Reproaches to the Sanhedrim, The Interview between Jesus and Pilate, His Appearance before Herod, His Scourging and Crowning with Thorns, The Pronouncing of his Death Sentence by Pilate, The Ascent to Golgotha, The Crucifixion and Burial, The Resurrection and Ascension. The whole lesson of Christ's life, the whole lesson of Christ's death, are thus shown, taught, impressed with a vividness which one must be callous not to feel. The quality or condition of mind which can remain to the end either unmoved or antagonistic is not to be envied. But, setting aside all and every consideration of the moral quality of the Play, looking at it simply as a dramatic spectacle, as a matter of acting, of pictorial effects, it is impossible to deny to it a place among the masterly theatrical representations of the world. One's natural incredulity as to the possibility of true dramatic skill on the part of comparatively unlettered peasants melts and disappears at sight of the first act, The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem.

The stage, open to the sky, with a background so ingeniously arranged as to give a good representation of several streets of the city, is crowded in a few moments by five hundred men and women and children, all waving palm branches, singing hosannas, and crowding around the central figure of Jesus riding on an ass. The verisimilitude of the scene is bewildering. The splendor of the colors is dazzling. Watching this crowd of five hundred actors closely, one finds not a single man, woman, or little child performing his part mechanically or absently. The whole five hundred are acting as if each one regarded his part as the central and prominent one; in fact, they are so acting that it does not seem acting: this is characteristic of the acting throughout the play. There is not a moment's slighting or tameness anywhere. The most insignificant part is rendered as honestly as the most important, and with the same abandon and fervor. There are myriads of little by-plays and touches, which one hardly recognizes in the first seeing of it, the interest is so intense and the movement so rapid; but, seeing it a second time, one is almost more impressed by these perfections in minor points than by the rendering of the chief parts. The scribes who sit quietly writing in the foreground of the Sanhedrim Court; the disciples who have nothing to do but to appear to listen while Jesus speaks; the money-changers picking up their coins; the messengers who come with only a word or two to speak; the soldiers drawing lots among themselves in a group for Jesus' garments, at a moment when all attention might be supposed to be concentrated on the central figures of the Crucifixion,—every one of these acts with an enthusiasm and absorption only to be explained by the mingling of a certain element of religious fervor with native and long-trained dramatic instinct.

This dramatic instinct is shown almost as much in the tableaux as in the acting. The poses and grouping are wonderful, and the power of remaining a long time motionless is certainly a trait which the Oberammergau people possess to a well-nigh superhuman extent. The curtain remained up, during many of these tableaux, five and seven minutes; and there was not a trace of unsteadiness to be seen in one of the characters. Even through a powerful glass I could not detect so much as the twitching of a muscle. This is especially noticeable in the tableau of the Fall of Manna in the Wilderness, which is one of the finest of the Play. There are in it more than four hundred persons; one hundred and fifty of them are children, some not over three years of age. These children are conspicuously grouped in the foreground; many of them are in attitudes which must be difficult to keep,—bent on one knee or with outstretched hand or with uplifted face,—but not one of the little creatures stirs head or foot or eye. Neither is there to be seen, as the curtain begins to fall, any tremor of preparation to move. Motionless as death they stand till the curtain shuts even their feet from view. Too much praise cannot be bestowed on the fidelity, accuracy, and beauty of the costumes. They are gorgeous in color and fabric, and have been studied carefully from the best authorities extant, and are not the least among the surprises which the Play affords to all who go to see it expecting it to be on the plane of ordinary theatrical representations. The splendor of some of the more crowded scenes is rarely equalled: such a combination of severe simplicity of outlines and contours, classic models of drapery, with brilliancy of coloring, is not to be seen in any other play now acted.

The high-water mark of the acting in the Play seems to me to be reached, not in the Christus, but by Judas. This part is played by an old man, Gregory Lechner. He is over sixty years of age, and his snowy beard and his hair have to be dyed to the red hue which is desired for the crafty Judas's face. From the time when, in Simon's house, he stands by, grumbling at the waste of the precious ointment poured by Mary Magdalene on the feet of Jesus, to the last moment of his wretched existence, when he is seen wandering in a desolate wilderness, about to take his own life in his remorse and despair, Judas' acting is superb. Face, attitudes, voice, action,—all are grandly true to the character, and marvellously full of life. It would be considered splendid acting on any stage in the world. Nothing could surpass its subtlety and fineness of conception, or the fire of its rendering. It is a conception quite unlike those ordinarily held of the character of Judas; ascribes the betrayal neither to a wilful, malignant treachery, nor, as is sometimes done, to a secret purpose of forcing Jesus to vindicate his claims to divine nature by working a miracle of discomfiture to his enemies, but to pure, unrestrained avarice,—the deadliest passion which can get possession of the human soul. This theory is tenable at every point of Judas' career as recorded in the Bible, and affords far broader scope for dramatic delineation than any other theory of his character and conduct. It is, in fact, the only theory which seems compatible with the entire belief in the supernatural nature of Jesus. Expecting up to the last minute that supernatural agencies would hinder the accomplishment of the Jews' utmost malice, he thought to realize the full benefit of the price of the betrayal, and yet not seriously imperil either the ultimate ends or the personal safety of Jesus. The struggle between the insatiable demon of avarice in his heart and all the nobler impulses restraining it is a struggle which is to be seen going on in his thoughts and repeated in his face in every scene in which he appears; and his final despair and remorse are but the natural culmination of the deed which he did only under the temporary control of a passion against which he was all the time struggling, and which he himself held in detestation and scorn. The gesture and look with which he at last flings down the bag of silver in the presence of the assembled Sanhedrim, exclaiming,—

are a triumph of dramatic art never to be forgotten. His last words as he wanders distraught in the dark wastes among barren trees, are one of the finest monologues of the Play. It was written by the priest Daisenberger.

The character of Christ is, of necessity, far the most difficult part in the Play. Looking at it either as a rendering of the supernatural or a portraying of the human Christ, there is apparent at once the well-nigh insurmountable difficulty in the way of actualizing it in any man's conception. Only the very profoundest religious fervor could carry any man through the effort of embodying it on the theory of Christ's divinity; and no amount of atheistic indifference could carry a man through the ghastly mockery of acting it on any other theory. Joseph Maier, who played the part in 1870, 1871, and 1880, is one of the best-skilled carvers in the village, and, it is said, has never carved anything but figures of Christ. He is a man of gentle and religious nature, and is, as any devout Oberammergauer would be, deeply pervaded by a sense of the solemnity of the function he performs in the Play. In the main, he acts the part with wonderful dignity and pathos. The only drawback is a certain undercurrent of self-consciousness which seems ever apparent in him. Perhaps this is only one of the limitations inevitably resulting from the over-demand which the part, once being accepted and regarded as a supernatural one, must perforce make on human powers. The dignity and dramatic unity of the Play are much heightened by the admirable manner in which a chorus is introduced, somewhat like the chorus of the old Greek plays. It consists of eighteen singers, with a leader styled the Choragus. The appearance and functions of these Schutzgeister, or guardian angels, as they are called, has been thus admirably described by a writer who has given the best detailed account ever written of the Passion Play:—

It is impossible for any description, however accurate and minute, to give a just idea of the effects produced by this chorus. The handling of it is perhaps the one thing which, more than any other, lifts the play to its high plane of dignity and beauty. The costumes are brilliant in color, and strictly classic in contour,—a full white tunic, edged with gold at hem and at throat, and simply confined at the waist by a loose girdle. Over these are worn flowing mantles of either pale blue, crimson, dull red, grayish purple, green, or scarlet. These mantles or robes are held in place carelessly by a band of gold across the breast. Crowns or tiaras of gold on the head complete the dress, which, for simplicity and grace of outline and beauty of coloring, could not be surpassed. The rhythmic precision with which the singers enter, take place, open their lines, and fall back on the right and left, is a marvel, until one learns that a diagram of their movement is marked out on the floor, and that the mysterious exactness and uniformity of their positions are simply the result of following each time the constantly marked lines on the stage. Their motions are slow and solemn, their expressions exalted and rapt; they also are actors in the grand scheme of the Play.

On the morning of the Play the whole village is astir before light; in fact, the village proper can hardly be said to have slept at all, for seven hundred out of its twelve hundred inhabitants are actors in the play, and are to be ready to attend a solemn mass at daylight.

Before eight o'clock every seat in the theatre is filled. There is no confusion, no noise. The proportion of those who have come to the play with as solemn a feeling as they would have followed the steps of the living Christ in JudÆa is so large that the contagion of their devout atmosphere spreads even to the most indifferent spectators, commanding quiet and serious demeanor.

The firing of a cannon announces the moment of beginning. Slow, swelling strains come from the orchestra; the stately chorus enters on the stage; the music stops; the leader gives a few words of prologue or argument, and immediately the chorus breaks into song.

From this moment to the end, eight long hours, with only one hour's rest at noon, the movement of this play is continuous. It is a wonderful instance of endurance on the part of the actors; the stage being entirely uncovered, sun and rain alike beat on their unprotected heads. The greater part of the auditorium also is uncovered, and there have been several instances in which the play has been performed in a violent storm of rain, thousands of spectators sitting drenched from beginning to end of the performance.

How incomparably the effects are, in sunny weather, heightened by this background of mountain and sky, fine distances, and vistas of mountain and meadow, and the canopy of heaven overhead, it is impossible to express; one only wonders, on seeing it, that outdoor theatres have not become a common summer pleasure for the whole world.

When birds fly over, they cast fluttering shadows of their wings on the front of Pilate's and Caiaphas' homes, as naturally as did JudÆan sparrows two thousand years ago. Even butterflies flitting past cast their tiny shadows on the stage; one bird paused, hovered, as if pondering what it all could mean, circled two or three times over the heads of the multitude, and then alighted on one of the wall-posts and watched for some time. Great banks of white cumulus clouds gathered and rested, dissolved and floated away, as the morning grew to noonday, and the noonday wore on toward night. This closeness of Nature is an accessory of illimitable effect; the visible presence of the sky seems a witness to invisible presences beyond it, and a direct bond with them. There must be many a soul, I am sure, who has felt closer to the world of spiritual existences, while listening to the music of the Oberammergau Passion Play, than in any other hour of his life; and who can never, so long as he lives, read without emotion the closing words of the venerable Daisenberger's little "History of Oberammergau:"—

University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.

Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.

RAMONA: A Story.

By HELEN JACKSON (H. H.).

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