The hay is put into the top storey, and can be dropped down through a trapdoor into the stable, which is on the second floor. Then the stable is cleaned out through trapdoors, which let all the dirt fall into the lower storey, from which it can be carted away to manure the fields.
A curious thing about most of the Norwegian farms is that there are no muddy cart tracks to be seen, the grass is green right up to the doors. Then there are no chickens about the place, as a rule; nor are there beehives, nor any garden. The carts are very small and low, sometimes on wheels, sometimes on runners, as sledges. The harness is very light, and yet strong; the driver walks behind the cart and drives the horse with a long pair of rope reins.
[Illustration: THE CARTS ARE SMALL AND LOW.]
Our house in the saeter was, like all the others, a single-storied log house, with a roof of planks covered with birchbark, over which is spread a thick layer of earth, which soon becomes grass-grown, so that it looks as if the roof were made of turf.
There were three or four rooms in the house, nice, clean rooms, with comfortable beds, and a great big open fire hearth in the corner, in which you light up your log fire whenever you like to have it—and we liked it pretty nearly always, for at this height, nearly 4000 feet, close to snow-clad mountains, the evenings and early mornings were very cold.
On our door was a big lock, and a lock in this country is not boxed up inside iron casing but is left open to view, so that you can see how it works, and get your fingers pinched in it if you like to be careless.
The farmer's wife, a kind, cheery, clean, motherly woman, was always cooking up good things for us, and feeding us to such an extent that if we had stopped there much longer we should have grown too fat to carry out our expedition.
She didn't understand a word of English, but she used to stop her work every now and then to come and hear us having our Norwegian lessons, and she used simply to howl with laughing at our attempts to pronounce the words the right way.
The food she used to give us is much the same as you get everywhere in Norway. For breakfast, which is generally about nine or ten o'clock (we persuaded her to give it to us much earlier), you have a cup of coffee and two or three glasses of milk, home-made bread, and a kind of thin oatmeal cake, butter, and goats'-milk cheese.
[Illustration: THE LOCK ON OUR DOOR.]