After a delightful little voyage in one of the smart Wilson Line steamers, I arrived one morning early in Christiania, the capital of Norway.
The town is an ordinary Continental town, but stands on the shores of an arm of the sea which is so shut in by wooded hills for some twenty miles that it is more like an inland lake than a gulf of the ocean.
What a place for Sea Scouts!
One of the first Norwegian boys to attract my attention was a Boy Scout—so like an English Scout that he may have been one for all I know, but I was not able to speak to him, I was catching a train, and he was going off in a hurry in another direction, evidently in trouble, as he was whistling and smiling! And it is difficult to tell a Norwegian boy from an English boy by his appearance, for they are very much alike.
And so are the girls and young women very like their British sisters. But then, as we all came of the same blood in bygone times, it is not altogether surprising.
Then their Royal Family is related to ours, for Queen Maud, the wife of King Haakon, is sister of our own King.
So Norwegians have much in common with the English, and since my visit Scouts of the two countries have become good friends and camped with each other.
There could be no better country than this for camping out. As you come through it in the train, you keep passing among wooded hills and then alongside rivers and lakes; a great deal of wild country with occasional cultivated parts where there are neat little wooden farmsteads and villages.
The houses are painted bright colours, and are roofed with tiles or shingles, that is, wooden slates, as in Canada. In fact, with its forests, lakes, and rivers, and their floating timber, and the sawmills, the country generally is not unlike Canada.
As wood is so abundant here, farm Scouts will be interested to see from the picture how they make their fences in place of hedges or ordinary post-and-rails. It is a kind of fence that you can make easily with almost any kind of slats or with brushwood or branches.