Huckleberry Finn announced our coming, and after we had taken toll of the ice-well, we went into the house. Inside the door was a huge room strewn with sleeping men and women. At one side was a stove with cooking-places; at the other stood a hand-loom with a piece of chequered blue-cotton fabric in the course of manufacture. Beside it there straddled a couple of spinning-wheels.
The room we were given for ourselves, after what we were used to, seemed an actual palace. It had two windows, a table, a white stone-stove, and hung on one of the walls was the picture of a gorgeous young lady working a Singer’s sewing-machine. There were two box-beds in the room, and one of them possessed a mosquito-bar. Ye gods! think of the luxury of it! Beds and a real mosquito-bar!
The man who received us was the Squire of Küstula, and a great man indeed. He was a Finn, and yet he was civil and kindly. He set before us for our entertainment a great bowl of curdled milk, and trotted about bare-footed beside us, and besought us to eat. But we were a bit too knocked up to have much appetite then, and we got on to the beds; whereupon he produced a second mosquito-bar, rigged it, and left us. Imagine the unspeakable luxury of it! sleep! on a real bed made of boards and mattressed with hay; and without either fleas or ticks or mosquitoes to bite one into wakefulness. We revelled there in sleep for three solid hours.
The noise of the housework roused us, and we got up, very swollen and stiff from the bites. The tub of curdled milk was on the table, and we ate it thirstily. The Squire heard us moving, and paddled in on his bare feet, and grinned affably. His name by the way was Johann Sanmelli Myal, but we called him Squire from the first, as that name seemed to suit him best.
We mentioned that we wanted a canoe and men to take us to Kittila, and he said he had guessed it already, and we could set off whenever we chose. Here was thoughtfulness and civility! It seemed marvellous to find such qualities and such a house within a day’s march of that dreadful, listless savage at Scurujärvi.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry were hanging about waiting to be paid, and we gave them what we had bargained for with the feckless one, and a douceur over for themselves, and then we went out and strolled about in the open air.
The settlement was very different from any we had seen before, and I only hope for the sake of the civil people who live there, that it was as prosperous as it looked. Viewed from a distance, so that one could not tell whether the green crops were rye and barley, or lanky maize, it might have been a settlement in North Carolina or the Western States, except for one thing—there was no litter about. There were none of those heaps of disused meat, and yeast, and tomato tins, so inseparable from new American civilisation. All was trim.
There were a few Lapps about the place it is true, but they were merely in Küstula as dependants. Not one owned a farm. The people of Küstula, however, had dealings with the aboriginal in another way. For all winter traction and transport they used reindeer, but when we visited the village there was not a single one within its boundaries. Each farmer had an agreement with a Lapp, and sent away his ear-marked deer to be pastured under the Lapp’s charge on the distant uplands of the fjeld and tundra.
We made no long stay in Küstula. For the first time since we had set foot in the country, transport was made ready for us without a weary haggle of words; and the unaccustomed easiness of it was too delightful not to be taken advantage of. We limped stiffly down through the slip-rails of the fields, a bevy of men and children and women all accompanying us, and we came upon the river some half mile away from the house where we had slept. The map names it the Loukinenjoki, but the Finns of Küstula, knowing nothing of imaginative maps, and being taught on these matters merely by the tradition of their forefathers, preferred to call it the Loosnen.