Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

Fölge dem til Döden's Port."

ENCYCLICALS OF A TRAVELLER.

I.

Dear People,—We had a fine send-off from Christiania. The landlord of the Scandinavie sent up to know if we would do him the honor to drive down to the steamer in his private carriage. Katrina delivered the message with exultant eyes. "You see," she said, "he likes to show dat he do not every day get such in de house." We sent word back that we should consider ourselves most honored; and so when we went downstairs, there stood a fine landau open, with bouquets lying on the seats, and a driver in livery; and the landlord himself in the doorway, and the landlord's wife, who had sent us the bouquets, Katrina said, peering from behind the curtains. When she saw Katrina pointing her out, she threw the curtains back and appeared full in view, smiling and waving her hand; we lifted up our bouquets, and waved them to her, and smiled our thanks. Katrina sprang up, with my cloak on her arm, to the coachman's seat. "I tink I go down too," she exclaimed, "I see you all safe;" and so we drove off, with as much smiling and bowing and "fare-welling" as if we had been cousins and aunts of everybody in the Scandinavie. How we did hate to leave our great corner rooms, with five windows in them, the fifth window being across the corner, which is not a right-angled corner, but like a huge bay-window! This utilization of the corner is a very noticeable feature in the streets of Christiania. In the greater part of the best houses the corner is cut off in this way; the door into the room being across the opposite corner (also cut off), thus making a six-sided room. The improvement in the street-fronts of handsome blocks of buildings made by this shape instead of the usual rectangular corner is greater than would be supposed, and the rooms made in this fashion are delightfully bright, airy, and out of the common.

I did not quite fancy sailing in a steamer named "Balder,"—one gets superstitious in Norway,—but I think we had flowers enough on board to have saved us if Loki herself had wished us ill. Nothing in all Norway is more striking than the Norwegian's love of flowers. It is no exaggeration to say that one does not see a house without flowers in the window. In the better houses every window in the front, even up to the little four-paned window in the gable, has its row of flower-pots; and even in the very poorest hovels there will be at least one window flower-filled. This general love and culture of flowers makes it the most natural thing in the world for the Norwegian, when he travels, to be carrying along something in the shape of a plant. He is either taking it home or carrying it as a gift to some one he is going to visit. I have not yet been on a steamboat where I did not see at least a dozen potted plants, of one sort or another, being carefully carried along, as hand luggage, by men or women; and as for bouquets, they are almost as common as hats and bonnets. Of the potted plants, five out of seven will be green myrtles, and usually the narrow leaf. There is a reason for this,—the Norwegian bride, of the better class, wears always a chaplet of green myrtle, and has her white veil trimmed with little knots of it from top to bottom. The chaplet is made in front somewhat after the shape of the high gilded crowns worn by the peasant brides; but at the back it is simply a narrow wreath confining the veil. After I knew this, I looked with more interest at the pots of myrtle I met everywhere, journeying about from place to place; and I observed, after this, what I had not before noticed, that every house had at least one pot of myrtle in its windows.

There were a dozen different varieties of carnations in our bouquets. The first thing I saw as we moved off from the wharf was a shabbily dressed little girl with a big bouquet entirely of carnations, in which there must have been many more. In a few minutes a woman, still shabbier than the little girl, came down into the cabin with a great wooden box of the sort that Norwegian women carry everything in, from potatoes up to their church fineries: it is an oval box with a little peak at each end like a squirrel cage; the top, which has a hole in the middle, fits down around these peaks so tight that the box is safely lifted by this handle; and, as I say, everything that a Norwegian woman wants to carry, she puts into her tine (pronounced, "teener"). Some of them are painted in gay colors; others are left plain. Setting down the box, she opened it, and proceeded to sprinkle with water one of the most beautiful wreaths I have ever seen,—white lilies, roses, and green myrtle. I think it came from a wedding; but as she knew no English, and I no Norwegian, I could not find out. Two nights and a day she was going to carry it, however, and she sprinkled it several times a day. An hour later, when I went down into the cabin, there was a row of bouquets filling the table under the looking-glass; five pots of flowers standing on the floor, and in several staterooms whose doors were standing open I saw still more of both bouquets and plants. This is only a common illustration of the universal custom. It is a beautiful one, and in thorough keeping with the affectionate simplicity of the Norwegian character.

Christiania looked beautiful as we sailed away. It lies in the hollow, or rather on the shore rim of the fine amphitheatre of hills which makes the head of the Christiania Fjord. Fjord is a much more picturesque word than bay; and I suppose when a bay travels up into the heart of a country scores of miles, slips under several narrow strips of land one after the other, making lakes between them, it is entitled to be called something more than plain bay; but I wish it had been a word easier to pronounce. I never could say "fjord," when I read the word in America; and all that I have gained on the pronouncing of it by coming to Norway is to become still more distinctly aware that I always pronounce it wrong. I do not think Cadmus ever intended that j should be y, or that one should be called on to pronounce f before it.

The Christiania Fjord has nothing of grandeur about it, like the wilder fjords on the west coast of Norway. It is smiling and gracious, with beautifully rounded and interlocking hills,—intervals of pine woods, with green meadows and fields, pretty villages and hamlets, farm-houses and country-seats, and islands unnumbered, which deceive the eye continually, seeming to be themselves the shore. We left Christiania at two o'clock; at that hour the light on a Norway summer day is like high noon in other parts of the world,—in fact, it's noon till four o'clock in the afternoon, and then it is afternoon till ten, and then a good, long, very light twilight to go to bed by at eleven or twelve, and if you want to get up again at three o'clock in the morning you can wake without any trouble, for it is broad daylight: all of which is funny for once or twice, or perhaps for ten times, but not for very long.

It was not till four or five o'clock that we began to see the full beauty of the fjord; then the sun had gone far enough over to cast a shadow,—soften all the forest tops on the west side, and cast shadows on the east side. The little oases of bright green farm-lands, with their clusters of houses, seemed to sink deeper and deeper into their dark pine-tree settings,—the fjord grew wider and wider, and was as smooth as a lake: now and then we drew up by a little village and half stopped,—it seemed no more than that,—and somebody would climb on or off the steamer by little cockles of boats that bobbed alongside. Sometimes we came to a full stop, and lay several minutes at a wharf, loading or unloading bags of grain. I think we took on just as many as we took off,—like a game of bean-bags between the villages. The sailors carried them off and on their backs, one set standing still in their places to lift the bags up on their comrades' backs; they lifted with a will, and then folded their arms and waited till the bag-carriers came back to be loaded up again. If I could have spoken Norwegian, I should have asked whether those sets of men took turn and turn about, or whether one set always lifted up the loads and the others lugged them,—probably the latter. That's the way it is in life; but I never saw a more striking example of it than in the picture these sailors made standing with folded arms doing nothing, waiting till their fellows came back again to be loaded down like beasts of burden. It was at "Moss" we saw this,—a pretty name for a little town with a handful of gay-colored houses, red, yellow, and white, set in green fields and woods. Women came on board here with trays of apples and pears to sell,—little wizened pears red high up on one side, like some old spinsters' cheeks in New England. Children came too, with cherries tied up in bunches of about ten to a bunch; they looked dear, but it was only a few hundredths of a quarter of a dollar that they cost. Since I have found out that a kroner is only about twenty-seven cents, and that it takes one hundred ore to make a kroner, all the things that cost only a few ore seem to me so ridiculously cheap as not to be worth talking about. These children with the cherries were all barefoot, and they were so shy that they curled and mauled their little brown toes all the time they were selling their cherries, just as children one shade less shy twist and untwist their fingers.