Moodie, a little afraid of the Captain’s satire—though the direction, after all, was nothing more than the ordinary Swedish form in which one gentleman addresses another, and quite as appropriate as our much mis-used esquire,—crumpled up the envelope in great haste.
“Hurrah!” said he, flourishing the letter over his head, “this is the very thing for us—you are in high luck; look here.”
“What is it?” said the Captain, for the letter, which was in Swedish and written in the Swedish character, might as well have been Cyrillic or Uncial, for anything he could make out of it.
“Why, there is to be a skal in Wermeland, next Tuesday; a grand bear hunt, in which they drive twenty or thirty miles of country; this letter is from the very man I have been speaking of—Bjornstjerna, the Ofwer Jagmästere, and my own particular friend. Some half dozen respectable farmers have made oath to him that they have been annoyed by bears, and he tells me he has written to the præster of the neighbourhood, to give notice from their pulpits, and to turn out the whole country. That is the legal form on such occasions, and there is a heavy fine for any man who does not obey it.”
“Hurrah!” said the Captain, in his turn, “then we shall kill a bear at last.”
“That you will,” said Moodie; “Bjornstjerna knows his business as well as any man in Sweden; there are people who fancy his patronymic a nick-name[47] of his own earning. He would not be turning out the country for nothing, you may depend on it.”
“Where is this to take place?”
“Why, in Upper Wermeland, as I told you, near Lysvic, not very far from the banks of the Klara, a river I know well, as full of grayling as it can hold; not that that has much to do with bear hunting. It is not above a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles from this.”
“Quite in the neighbourhood,” said the Captain, laughing.
“O that is nothing, we never mind a hundred miles or so. If we get anything like a breeze, we will run across the Wener, in the yacht, we can send the carioles on by land to Amal, and we will pick up a waggon, or something, for the men, at there or at Carlstad; and then you will see how we will rattle up the country. We must send a boat, though, to Wenersborg this very night, and tell the post-master to make out a forbud for us; it will not do to trust to chance on such an occasion as this, for we shall have to collect a good many horses at every station. Let me see, we shall want one for each of us, and three for the waggon, that will make seven; and I suppose they will charge half a horse more besides the forbud; for we shall have four men with us, and we must take things enough to make us comfortable, for I dare say we shall have a week in the forest, one way or the other. Come, finish that bottle, and we will go in and have some coffee; it is not so well to stay out here at night when that blue mist is hanging on the swamp; besides, these rascally musquitoes are anything but pleasant.”