“But I have not the pleasure of his acquaintance.”
“That does not matter the least. He is forfaerdelig gjestfri (frightfully hospitable) og meget snil (and very good).”
So I make bold to grope my way to the house, and, finding the door, tap at it. It is opened by a short, good-humoured looking person, the clergyman himself, who quiets the big dog that I had kept at bay with my fishing-rod, asks me who I am, and bids me come in and be welcome, as if he had known me all the days of my life. Few minutes elapse before I am eating cold meat and drinking ale; during the repast chatting with my host on all sorts of matters. Supper ended, he shows me to the best chamber, or stranger’s room, where I am soon reposing luxuriously under an eider-down coverlet. This I kicked off in my slumbers, it being evidently too hot for an Englishman in summer time, even in Norway. What delightful things these eider-downs must be in the cold of a northern winter.
A young female servant, Helvig by name, brings my boots in the morning. She was clad in the working-day dress of the country maidens. To begin with the beginning, or her head. It is covered with a coloured cotton couvrechef. Her masculine chemise is fastened at the throat by two enormous studs of silver filigree, bullet shaped, and is, below this, further confined by a silver brooch (Norwegicè “ring”), shaped like a heart. Her petticoat, which covers very little of her black worsted stockings, makes up for its shortcomings in that direction, by reaching right up above her bosom. It is of a dingy white wool, and is edged with three broad stripes of black. On Sunday her petticoat is black, with red or blue edging.
She brings me her tartan of red wool with white stripes for my inspection. It is called “kjell,” a word which occurs in the old ballad of “The Gay Goss Hawk.”
Then up and got her seven sisters,
And sewed to her a kell.
There it means pall, but the Norwegian word is also used of any coverlet. The maidens wear it just like a Parisian lady would her shawl, i.e., below the shoulders, and tight over the elbows. The married women, however, carry it like the Scotch plaid, over one shoulder and under the other arm, with their baby in the kolpos, or sinus, in front.
This article of dress, which is sometimes white, striped with red—the stripes being most frequent at the ends—and also the above manner of wearing it, are thought to corroborate the tradition that these people are a Scotch colony. The language, too, contains many words not known elsewhere in Norway, but used in England. Instead of “skee,” they say “spon,” which is nothing but the Icelandic “spónn,” and our “spoon.” In the words kniv (knife), and knap (button), the k is silent before n; whereas, elsewhere in Norway, it is pronounced. L, too, is silent before d, as with us; “skulde” (should) being pronounced “skud,” or “shud.” The common word for a river in Norway is “elv;” here it is “aas,” pronounced “ose,” which is nothing but the frequent “ooze” of England, meaning, in fact, “a stream generally.”