Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

One dollar and sixty-two cents for a tiny cantaloupe! Katrina had her reward. "Oh, but I am dat glad ven I make you laugh," she said roguishly, picking up her melon, as I cried out with surprise and amusement,—

"I should think not. I never heard of such a price for a melon."

"So I tink," said Katrina. "I ask de man who buy dem melons, and he say plenty peoples; but I tink it is all shtories." And she ran downstairs laughing so that I heard her, all the way, two flights down to the door.

High up on the dark wooded mountain wall which lies to the north and northwest of Christiania is a spot of light color. In the early morning it is vivid green; sometimes at sunset it catches a tint of gold; but neither at morn nor at night can it ever be overlooked. It is a perpetual lure to the eye, and stimulus to the imagination. What eyry is it that has cleared for itself this loop-hole in the solid mountain-forest? Is it a clearing, or only a bit of varied wooding of a contrasting color to the rest? For several days I looked at it before I asked; and I had grown so impressed by its mystery and charm, that when I found it was a house, the summer home of a rich Christiania family, and one of the places always shown to travellers, I felt more than half-way minded not to go near it,—to keep it still nothing more than a far-away, changing, luring oasis of sunny gold or wistful green on the mountain-side. Had it been called by any other name, my instinct to leave it unknown might have triumphed; but the words "Frogner Sæter" were almost as great a lure to the imagination as the green oasis itself. The sæter, high up on some mountain-side, is the fulfilling of the Norwegian out-door life, the key-note of the Norwegian summer. The gentle kine know it as well as their mistresses who go thither with them. Three months in the upper air, in the spicy and fragrant woods,—no matter if it be solitary and if the work be hard, the sæter life must be the best the Norwegians know,—must elevate and develop them, and strengthen them for their long, sunless winters. I had looked up from the Vossevangen Valley, from Ringeriket, and from the Hardanger country to many such gleaming points of lighter green, tossed up as it were on the billowy forests. They were beyond the reach of any methods of ascent at my command; unwillingly I had accepted again and again the wisdom of the farm people, who said "the road up to the sæter was too hard for those who were not used to it." Reluctantly I had put the sæter out of my hopes, as a thing to be known only by imagination and other people's descriptions. Therefore the name of the Frogner Sæter was a lure not to be resisted; a sæter to which one might drive in a comfortable carriage over a good road could not be the ideal sæter of the wild country life, but still it was called "sæter;" we would go, and we would take a day for the going and coming.

"Dat will be bestest," said Katrina. "I tink you like dat high place better as Christiania."

On the way we called at the office of a homœopathic physician, whose name had been given to me by a Bergen friend. He spoke no English, and for the first time Katrina's failed. I saw at once that she did not convey my meanings to him, nor his to me, with accuracy. She was out of her depth. Her mortification was droll; it reached the climax when it came to the word "dynamic." Poor little child! How should she have known that!

"I vill understand! I vill!" she exclaimed; and the good-natured doctor took pains to explain to her at some length; at the end of his explanation she turned to me triumphantly, with a nod: "Now I know very well; it is another kind of strongth from the strongth of a machine. It is not such strongth that you can see, or you can make with your hands; but it is strongth all the same,"—a definition which might be commended to the careful attention of all persons in the habit or need of using the word "dynamic."

It is five miles from Christiania out and up to the Frogner Sæter, first through pretty suburban streets which are more roads than streets, with picturesque wooden houses, painted in wonderful colors,—lilac, apple-green, white with orange-colored settings to doors and windows, yellow pine left its own color, oiled, and decorated with white or with maroon red. They look like the gay toy-houses sold in boxes for children to play with. There is no one of them, perhaps, which one would not grow very weary of, if he had to see it every day, but the effect of the succession of them along the roadside is surprisingly gay and picturesque. Their variety of shape and the pretty little balconies of carved lattice-work add much to this picturesqueness. They are all surrounded by flower-gardens of a simple kind,—old-fashioned flowers growing in clumps and straight borders, and every window-sill full of plants in bloom; windows all opening outward like doors, so that in a warm day, when every window-sash is thrown open, the houses have a strange look of being a-flutter. There is no expression of elegance or of the habits or standards of great wealth about these suburban houses of Christiania; but there is a very rare and charming expression of comfort and good cheer, and a childlike simplicity which dotes on flowers and has not outgrown the love of bright colors. I do not know anywhere a region where houses are so instantly and good-naturedly attractive, with a suggestion of good fellowship, and sensible, easy-going good times inside and out.

The last three miles of the road to the sæter are steadily up, and all the way through dense woods of fir and spruce,—that grand Norway spruce, which spreads its boughs out generously as palms, and loads down each twig so full that by their own weight of shining green the lower branches trail out along the ground, and the upper ones fold a little and slant downwards from the middle, as if avalanches of snow had just slid off on each side and bent them. Here were great beds of ferns, clusters of bluebells, and territories of Linnæa. In June the mountain-side must be fragrant with its flowers.

Katrina glowed with pleasure. In her colder, barrener home she had seen no such lavishness as this.