Our Little Finnish Cousin

by Clara Vostrovsky Winlow

Sometimes instead of these stories, the men would sing rough songs that sounded out there in the wilds more weird and melancholy than they really were. Sometimes they discussed the future of Finland. There was one fellow among them to whom Juhani loved to listen. He remembered long the man's reply to a particularly pessimistic statement. "Our future depends on ourselves. Have we not the sea? Does it not stand for power and freedom? Shame, I say, on those who do not see it!"

Things in camp went along quietly enough until near the end of the season, when two of the men had a fight which might have ended seriously had they not been separated in time, for both had drawn their pukkos (knives).

Before Juhani left for home the driver invited him to come on a trip much further east than they were stationed. His uncle consented. It gave Juhani an opportunity to see the very primitive and wasteful agricultural methods that are still practiced in Finland in out-of-the-way places, that of burning down the forest to fertilize the land.

They spent the first night with the owner of a place on which this was done. He did his best to entertain them well.

After they had had supper the family gathered around the big rude fireplace, and while the fire crackled and a drink of some kind was passed around the talk drifted to the future prospects of the country. Then the peasant proprietor told of the time when the deposed Tzar of Russia, Nicholas II, through the Manifesto of February fifteenth, 1899, had tried to deprive Finland of most of her independence. "I heard through my young son who had just returned from further South, that signatures for a petition to the Tzar were being sought. 'They shall not lack mine,' I told my wife. It was bitterly cold even for one used to severe months of blinding snow, but I put on my skis and made my way through the dense forest in the face of a harsh wind, to the nearest settlement Here I learned that a messenger gathering signatures had just left. Without stopping for food or drink, I followed the direction he had taken through a frozen swamp and came up with him just before nightfall. And there, with nothing to be seen but snow around us, I signed the paper and returned to the settlement while he went on for another hour to the neighboring hamlet."

"I know of a case to match that somewhat," said the driver. "After the Tzar's Manifesto, a well-to-do farmer, who lived too far away to go to Helsingfors, wrote a petition himself to the Tzar, had it signed by the family, servants and those nearest, and then forwarded it."

Here the old grandmother, an intelligent looking peasant woman, with a brown plaid shawl tightly pinned around her neck, took the lead in the conversation, harking back to older times when she had known Elias Lönnrot who made the folk songs he gathered into a whole as the great Finnish epic, the "Kalevala." This was evidently a favorite subject with her. "I was only a young girl," she said, "when he came as a physician to Kajana, which is a place of which it was then said there were two streets, 'Along one go pigs when it's wet, along the other the inhabitants when it's dry.' Lönnrot was a strong fine fellow, very gentle. People used to say he would cry if he happened to kill a fly. He was rather careless about his clothes. I met him one day just as he was starting on one of his searches for folk songs. He was dressed like a peasant, with a short pipe in his mouth and a staff in his hand. A small flute hung from his button-hole, while a valise and gun were slung on his back. After he came back we spoke of nothing for weeks except his adventures. In one place he was taken for a tramp and found it impossible to secure any sort of vehicle to take him on his way. In another village the people thought him a wizard. They wouldn't give him any food. He remembered that an eclipse of the sun would take place that day. 'I'll make the sun die,' he said, 'if you don't attend to my wants.' The people laughed and hooted, but when the sun actually did disappear they were badly frightened and begged him on their knees to make it come back and brought him all kinds of good things to eat."

"It seems to me," said her son reflectively, "that Lönnrot published something else besides the 'Kalevala.'"

"Indeed he did," said the grandmother quickly, proud of her knowledge, "why, I've taught you many a verse given in the Kanteletaar (the Daughter of the Kantele). It contains about seven hundred ancient songs and ballads."