Chapter III: Norway, Denmark, and Germany (2)

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.