The Charm of Scandinavia

by Francis E. Clark; Sydney Clark

The automobile, which abounds everywhere, is an automatic machine which registers in its taximeter the distance run, and thus avoids all disputes with the chauffeur. The telephones, whose little green pagodas dot the city in every direction, are also penny-in-the-slot affairs, and you can talk, as I think I have already told you, with any town on the map of Scandinavia for a very reasonable sum.

But when it comes time for frokost (breakfast), or middag (dinner), then the automat is very much in evidence. It seems at first to the traveler that the keeping of automat restaurants is the chief business in Stockholm, for we find one at almost every corner. Drop a ten öre piece in the slot, and, according to your choice of viands, a glass of milk, a cup of tea or coffee, a cheese sandwich, a sausage, or a boiled egg drops out of the spout. Or, if you wish a more extravagant meal, twenty-five öre (about seven cents) will give you your choice of a dozen hot dishes. One writer with a sense of humor speaks of such establishments as I have described as the “rich man’s automat,” but he is not far from wrong when you compare this establishment with the little wooden buildings which you see in the market squares and along the docks of Stockholm, for this is the automat reduced to its lowest terms for cheapness and simplicity. There is no apparent opening in this wooden box, but a shelf runs around it, and large cups are chained to it, with a tap in the wall at every few feet. Inside is a tank of hot milk. The marketmen drop a five öre piece (a trifle over a cent) into the slot, and out runs nearly a pint of rich, hot milk. No wonder that there are enough cattle to give every man, woman, and child in Sweden on the average one milch cow, or else the “poor man’s automat” could never be maintained at any such figures.

The process of arithmetic, however, by which this milch cow is allotted to every man, woman, and child, is interesting and peculiar, since for the purpose of comparative statistics the Swedish Bureau has invented fictitious animals called “unified cattle.” This is explained by Mr. Sundbarg in his Swedish Land and Folk as follows: The milch cow is the unit, and all other animals the multiples. For instance, a horse is equal to a cow and a third; a sheep is reckoned as a tenth of a cow; a goat as only a twelfth of a cow, while it takes four pigs to make a cow. I cannot for the life of me see why a pig should be worth two and a half sheep; can you? A reindeer is only worth a fifth of a cow, which seems to me altogether too small a value to put upon these indispensable animals of snowland.

Well, the result is that in the last census which is available to me Sweden possessed something over five millions of these composite animals called “unified cattle,” and, as I before told you, every mother’s son and daughter in Sweden, on the average, possesses one milch cow, or it may be three quarters of a horse, ten sheep, twelve goats, four pigs, or five and a half reindeer. If I were a Swede I think I would choose to have my share in reindeer.

While we are dealing with statistics, Judicia, let us have it out and squeeze the census dry of interesting facts and be done with it. How many wealthy persons do you suppose there are among the five and a half millions of Swedes who have not yet crossed the Atlantic to seek a home in the New World? Well, if at your leisure you can find out what 13.75 per cent of five and a half millions is you will know exactly the number of people that can be called “wealthy.” It would not be far from seven hundred thousand. Then in “easy” circumstances we find sixty-seven per cent of the people, or about three and a half millions. In “straightened” circumstances there are rather more than could be called wealthy, while we find that there are only about three per cent of the people who are in genuine poverty and have to receive help from the State or from their richer neighbors.

I think these statistics speak exceedingly well, for the Swedes. Agur’s prayer, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me,” seems to have been answered for them. Even those in wealthy circumstances are not so enormously rich that they are in danger of losing heaven by such a burden of wealth as would prevent the camel from passing through the eye of the needle.

Since I have told you how many cows, how many fractions of a pig or of a reindeer every Swede possesses, you may also be glad to know that if all the land were divided up evenly every old grandam and every baby in the cradle would have twenty and a half acres. Only two and a quarter acres of these are under cultivation, but he would have nearly ten acres of woodland, which would surely furnish him with enough fuel, while his seven and a half acres of uncultivated land would furnish plenty of pasturage for his cow, or his three-quarters of a horse.

Speaking of fuel, I must launch into a mild eulogy of these Swedish stoves. Even Aylmer will admit that they are better than the air-tight, iron monstrosities which they have in Norway, and in America too, for that matter, where “central heating” has not replaced them. These Swedish stoves are much like the German porcelain heaters, only they are built on a more generous scale. They occupy a whole corner of the room, and often extend from floor to ceiling. Usually they are of white porcelain, though often other colored tiles are used, and sometimes they are highly ornamented with cupids or dragons, or like allegorical animals.

In the morning, quite early, the pretty chambermaid makes a fire of short birch sticks, filling the firebox up to the top. Then the drafts must be left open until all the gases and smoke have escaped, which have such a tortuous course to travel through the many pipes concealed within the porcelain that gradually they heat the great white monument through and through. When the birch is reduced to living coals, the dampers are shut off; the heat is thus retained, and a genial warmth is given out for the rest of the day. Even at night the tilings of the stove are quite warm, and you seldom want more than one “heating” in the course of the twenty-four hours, except in the most extreme weather.