Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

"There is not a man in all Vos," they said, "who has not a relative in America." And they asked eager question after question, in insatiable curiosity, about the unknown country whither their friends had gone.

The wives and daughters of the family were all away, up at the sæter with the cows; only the men and the servant maids were left at home to make the hay. Would I not go up to the sæter? The mistress would be distressed that an American lady had visited the farm in her absence. I could easily go to the sæter in a day. It was only five hours on horseback, and about a half-hour's walk, at the last, over a path too rough even for riding. Very warmly the men urged Sanna to induce me to make the trip. They themselves would leave the haying and go with me, if I would only go; and I must never think I had seen Norwegian farming unless I had seen the sæter also, they said.

The maids were at dinner in the kitchen. It was a large room, with walls not more than eight feet high, black with smoke; and in the centre a square stone trough, above which was built a funnel chimney. In this hollow trough a fire smouldered, and above it hung an enormous black caldron, full of beer, which was being brewed. One of the maids sprang from her dinner, lifted a trap door in the floor, disappeared in the cellar, and presently returned, bringing a curious wooden drinking-vessel shaped like a great bowl, with a prow at each side for handles, and painted in gay colors. This was brimming full of new beer, just brewed. Sanna whispered to me that it would be bad manners if we did not drink freely of it. It was passed in turn to each member of the party. The driver, eying me sharply as I forced down a few mouthfuls of the nauseous drink, said something to Sanna.

"He asks if American ladies do not like beer," said Sanna. "He is mortified that you do not drink. It will be best that we drink all we can. It is all what they have. Only I do hope that they give us not brandy."

There was no window in the kitchen, no ventilation except through the chimney and the door. A bare wooden table, wooden chairs, a few shelves, where were ranged some iron utensils, were all the furniture of the gloomy room. The maids' dinner consisted of a huge plate of fladbröd and jugs of milk; nothing else. They would live on that, Sanna said, for weeks, and work in the hay-fields from sunrise till midnight.

Opposite the kitchen was the living-room,—the same smoky log walls, bare floors, wooden chairs and benches. The expression of poverty was dismal.

"I thought you said these people were well to do!" I exclaimed.

"So they are," replied Sanna. "They are very well off; they do not know that it is not comfort to be like this. They shall have money in banks, these people. All the farmers in Vos are rich."

Above the living-room were two bedrooms and clothes-rooms. Here, in gay painted scarlet boxes and hanging from lines, were the clothes of the family and the bed linen of the house. Mistress and maid alike must keep their clothes in this common room. The trunks were ranged around the sides of the room, each locked with a key big enough to lock prison doors. On one side of one of the rooms were three bunk beds built in under the eaves. These were filled with loose straw, and had only blankets for covers. Into this straw the Norwegian burrows by night, rolled in his blankets. The beds can never be moved, for they are built in with the framework of the house. No wonder that the Norwegian flea has, by generations of such good lodging and food, become a triumphant Bedouin marauder, in comparison with whom the fleas of all other countries are too petty to deserve mention.

The good-natured farmer opened his mother's box as well as his wife's, and with awkward and unaccustomed hands shook out their Sunday costumes for us to see. From another box, filled with soft blankets and linen, he took out a bottle of brandy, and pouring some into a little silver bowl, with the same prow-shaped handles as the wooden one we had seen in the kitchen, pressed us to drink. One drop of it was like liquid fire. He seemed hurt that we refused more, and poured it down his own throat at a gulp, without change of a muscle. Then he hid the brandy bottle again under the blankets, and the little silver cup in the till of his mother's chest, and locked them both up with the huge keys.