Glimpses of Three Coasts Part 19

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 Osteroen's sh.o.r.e 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 appet.i.te, 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 gra.s.ses 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 pa.s.sing, the men lifted it out, dripping, ten superb trout das.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 pa.s.sed 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, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, 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 Const.i.tution, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 fort.i.tude 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.sing 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 sh.o.r.es 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 n.o.body 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 cl.u.s.ters of houses, tucked in in nooks among rocks and on rims of sh.o.r.e 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 Sat.u.r.days 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 pa.s.sengers. 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 sh.e.l.l,--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 att.i.tude, 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 sh.o.r.e!" 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.s; s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.s 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 coa.r.s.e 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 ap.r.o.n, sleeveless scarlet jacket, with a gay beaded stomacher over a full white blouse, s.h.i.+ning 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 b.u.t.tons 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. Gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s; 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 b.u.t.tercups, 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed. Clumps and groves of ash-trees on the sh.o.r.es 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, saeters 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 linnaea 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, s.h.i.+ning lakes. On the sh.o.r.e 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 saeter which we could see, well up in the cloud region, far above the woods on the left. Down the steep path from this saeter 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 ma.s.ses 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 sh.o.r.e 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 b.u.t.ter and cheese always bring high prices in market.