Nor must I omit to mention the quantities of Dutch myrtle, or sweet gale (pors), with which the swampy grounds abound. It possesses strong narcotic qualities, and is put in some districts into the beer, while, elsewhere, a decoction of it is sprinkled about the houses to intimidate the fleas, who have a great horror of it. Lyng (lüng), some of it white, and that of a peculiar kind, which I have never seen before, also clings to the sides of the high grounds, while strawberries and raspberries of excellent taste are not wanting.
CHAPTER VI.
A dreary station—Strange bed-fellows—Broadsides—Comfortable proverb—Skarp England—Interesting particulars—A hospitable Norwegian Foged—Foster-children—The great bear-hunter—A terrible Bruin—Forty winks—The great Vennefoss—A temperance lamentation—More bear talk—Grey legs—Monosyllabic conversation—Trout fished from the briny deep—A warning to the beaux of St. James’s-street—Thieves’ cave—A novelette for the Adelphi.
I stop for the night at the dreary station of Homsmoen. By a singular economy in household furniture, the cornice of the uncurtained state-bed is made to serve as a shelf, and all the crockery, together with the other household gods or goods of the establishment, are perched thereon, threatening to fall upon me if I made the slightest movement, so that my feelings, and those of Damocles, must have been not unlike; and when I did get to sleep, my slumbers were suddenly disturbed by the creeping of a mouse or rat, not “behind the arras,” for the wooden walls were bare, but under my pillow. Gracious goodness! is it my destiny then to fall a prey to these wretches? Notwithstanding, I soon dozed off to sleep again, muttering to myself something about “Coctilibus muris,” and “dead for a ducat.”
In the morning, when the peasant-wife brings me coffee, I tell her of the muscipular disturbances of the past night. She replies, with much sang froid, “O ja, de pleie at holde sig da” (Oh yes, they are in the habit of being there), i.e., in the loose bed-straw.
While sipping my coffee, I read a printed address hung upon the wall, wherein “a simple Norwegian, of humble estate,” urges his countrymen not to drink brandy. A second notice is an explanation of infant baptism. This is evidently to counteract the doctrines of the clergyman Lammers, who, as I have mentioned elsewhere, has founded an antipædobaptist sect. Indeed, I see in the papers advertisements of half-a-dozen works that have lately appeared on the subject. Another specimen of this wall-literature was a collection of Norwegian proverbs, one of which might perhaps serve to reconcile an explorer in this country to indifferent accommodation. “The poor man’s house is his palace.” Another proverb rebuked pride, in the following manner:—“Dust is still dust, although it rise to heaven.”
Next day we pass a solitary farmstead, which my attendant informs me is called Skarp England (i.e., scanty, not deep-soiled, meadow-land). Were it not for those Angles, the generally reputed godfathers of England, one would almost be inclined to derive the name of our country from that green, meadow (eng) like appearance which must have caught the attention of the immigrant Jutes and Saxons. At least, such is the surmise of Professor Radix.
“And what road is that?” I asked, pointing to a very unmacadamized byway through the forest.