"No, no, Ada, not any more," she said, in a delicious low voice, to a child by her side, who was slyly taking a rose from one of the baskets. "You've enough there. It hurts them to lie in the 'ot sun.—My daughter, mem," she explained, as the little thing shrunk back, covered with confusion, and pretended to be very busy arranging the flowers on a little board laid across two stones, behind which she was squatted,—"my daughter, mem. All the profits of the flowers they sell are their own, mem. They puts it all in the missionary box. They'd eighteen an' six last year, mem, in all, besides what they put in the school box. Yes, mem, indeed they had."
It struck me that this devout mother took a strange view of the meaning of the word "own," and I did not spend so much money on Ada's flowers as I would have done if I had thought Ada would have the spending of it herself, in her own childish way. But I bought a big bunch of red and white daisies, and another of columbines, white pinks, ivy, and poppies; and the little maid, barely ten years old, took my silver, made change, and gave me the flowers with a winsome smile and a genuine market-woman's "Thank you, mem."
It was a pretty scene: the open space in front of the market building, filled with baskets, bags, barrows, piles of fresh green things, chiefly of those endless cabbage species, which England so proudly enumerates when called upon to mention her vegetables; the dealers were principally women, with fresh, fair faces, rosy cheeks, and soft voices; in the outer circle, scores of tiny donkey-carts, in which the vegetables had been brought. One chubby little girl, surely not more than seven, was beginning her market-woman's training by minding the donkey, while her mother attended to trade. As she stood by the donkey's side, her head barely reached to his ears; but he entered very cleverly into the spirit of the farce of being kept in place by such a mite, and to that end employed her busily in feeding him with handfuls of grass. If she stopped, he poked his nose into her neck and rummaged under her chin, till she began again. All had flowers to sell, if it were only a single bunch, or plant in a pot; and there were in the building several fine stalls entirely filled with flowers,—roses, carnations, geraniums, and wonderful pansies. Noticing, in one stall, a blossom I had never before seen, I asked the old woman who kept the stand to tell me its name. She clapped her hand to her head tragically. "'Deed, mem, it's strange. Ye're the second has asked me the name o' that flower; an' it's gone out o' my head. If the young lady that has the next stand was here, she'd tell ye. It was from her I got the roots: she's a great botanist, mem, an' a fine gardener. Could I send ye the name o' 't, mem? I'd be pleased to accommodate ye, an' may be ye'd like a root or two o' 't. It's a free grower. We've 'ad a death in the house, mem,—my little grandchild, only a few hours ill,—an' it seems like it 'ad confused the 'ole 'ouse. We've not 'ad 'eart to take pains with the flowers yet."
The old woman's artless, garrulous words smote like a sudden bell-note echo from a far past,—an echo that never ceases for hearts that have once known how bell-notes sound when bells toll for beloved dead! The thoughts her words woke seemed to span Chester's centuries more vividly than all the old chronicle traditions and legends, than sculptured Roman altar, or coin, or graven story in stone. The strange changes they recorded were but things of the surface, conditions of the hour. Through and past them all, life remained the same. Grief and joy do not alter shape or sort. Love and love's losses and hurts are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.
III.
NORWAY, DENMARK, AND GERMANY.
BERGEN DAYS.
The hardest way to go to Norway is by way of the North Sea. It is two days' and two nights' sail from Hull to Bergen; and two days and two nights on the North Sea are nearly as bad as two days and two nights on the English Channel would be. But the hardest way is the best way, in this as in so many other things. No possible approach to Norway from the Continent can give one the sudden characteristic impression of Norway sea and shore which he gets as he sails up the Stavanger Fjord, and sees the town of Stavanger looking off from its hillside over the fleets of island and rock that lie moored in its harbor.
At first sight it seems as if there were no Norway coast at all, only an endless series of islands beyond islands, never stayed by any barrier of mainland; or as if the mainland itself must be being disintegrated from its very centre outwards, breaking up and crumbling into pieces. Surely, the waters, when they were commanded to stay from off the earth, yielded the command but a fragmentary obedience so far as this region was concerned.
The tradition of the creation of Norway seems a natural outgrowth of the place,—the only way, in fact, of accounting for the lay of the land. The legend declares that Norway was made last, and in this wise: On the seventh day, while God was resting from his labors, the devil, full of spite at seeing so fair a world, hurled into the ocean a gigantic rock,—a rock so large that it threatened to break the axis of the universe. But the Lord seized it, and fixed it firm in place, with its myriad jutting points just above the waters. Between these points he scattered all the earth he had left; nothing like enough to cover the rock, or to make a respectable continent,—only just enough to redeem spots here and there, and give man a foothold on it. The fact that forty per cent of the whole surface of Norway is over three thousand feet above the sea is certainly a corroboration of this legend.
This island fringe gives to the coast of Norway an indefinable charm,—the charm of endless maze, vista, expectation, and surprise; lure, also, suggestion, dim hint, and reticent revelation, like a character one cannot fathom, and behavior one can never reckon on. Though the ship sail in and out of the labyrinths never so safely and quickly, fancy is always busy at deep-sea soundings; bewildered by the myriad shapes, and half conscious of a sort of rhythm in their swift, perpetual change, as if they, and not the ship, were gliding. The vivid verdure on them in spots has more the expression of something momentarily donned and worn than of a growth. It seems accidental and decorative, flung on suddenly; then, again, soft, thick, inexhaustible, as if the islands might be the tops of drowned forests.