A funeral could hardly by any possibility have been more solemn in the ancient times than a wedding. Indeed often it must have been a more joyous occasion, for I am told that in some sections, even to this day, after the relatives have kissed the corpse, all the guests present shake him by the hand, and that the friends usually speak of him not as dead, but as one “whom it hath pleased God to take.”
You can see what a delightful experience a voyage through lakeland must be, in the midst of such charming and ever-changing scenery, the human interest constantly kept alive, not only by the abundant life along the shore, but by the unforgotten customs of the past which the Kalevala has so beautifully preserved for us.
There are other and more thrilling voyages through the “Land of a Thousand Lakes” than the one I have taken you upon to-day. The trip, for instance, down the rapids of Uleå, which is made every day of the tourist season in long, narrow rowboats, under the care of skillful licensed pilots. The canoe trip from Moosehead Lake in Maine to the St. John River in New Brunswick through the Allegash waters is not unlike this journey down the Uleå River, though the passage of the many rapids is usually less thrilling. But in Finland, as in Maine, it takes a cool and skillful hand to pilot the frail craft down these ripping, roaring rapids. Now it looks as though the way was blocked up by a jutting headland; again it seems as if our craft would be dashed to pieces against a gigantic boulder in mid-stream, but always in the Uleå, as in the Allegash, the turn of a paddle avoids the threatened danger, and our boat floats out into smooth waters to the peaceful thoroughfare below the rapids.
But it is hopeless to attempt to describe all the interesting matters that cluster around country life in Finland. Here is a country as big as all Great Britain, with the Low Countries across the Channel thrown in. Who would have the nerve to attempt to describe country life in Belgium, Holland, Ireland, Scotland, and England in one letter? The very magnitude of the task must be my excuse for the fragmentary incompleteness of my attempt.
Faithfully yours,
Phillips.