At one draught down send it,
The reckoning will end it.
Kajsa Stina stands a drawing,
All my heart is clapper-clawing,
From the pot my fingers thawing—
Thus I sing my dying song.”
Fredman’s Epistle to Kajsa Stina, Karl Bellman.
Never had the arches of the old forest rung with such shouts and screams, and roaring songs, and bursts of laughter, as they did on the evening of the great skal. A few of the elderly people, but a very few, had had enough of it, and went off quietly to their homes as soon as they were released from duty; as for the rest, no one could have supposed that they had been worked off their legs, and kept from their natural sleep, and drenched to the skin for the last three or four days and nights; they were not over-clean, certainly, though some of the youngsters had contrived, somehow or other, to smarten themselves up for the occasion; but the rest made a great contrast to the women, those at least who had taken no active part in the skal,—their white woollen jackets, or scarlet or green spencers covered with embroidery and buttoned down the front with silver knobs, formed a pleasing relief to the dinginess and raggedness of active service. As for the unfortunate buglers, who, most of them, were general musicians, and would play upon anything that was wanted, these, without the least regard to their previous fatigues, which had been even greater than those of the beaters, were placed upon barrels, or carts, or stumps of trees, fiddling and clarionetting for the bare life, while men and women tore in wild polska round them.
Some travellers have characterized the Swedish dances as indecent; whether they are so or not, English papas, and mamas, and maiden aunts are very competent judges, for they are precisely the English polka, as we call it (dropping the s for convenience of pronunciation); the English polka is, in reality, the national peasant dance of Sweden; and in their own country the Swedes dance it with all their hearts and souls as well as their limbs and bodies—not sliding and mincing as we do, but downright pounding, so as to leave the print of the foot, and especially the heel, on the yielding turf.
It might seem difficult to provide refreshments for such a ball-room in such a place, where the dancers mustered somewhere about two thousand strong—but in truth they were no way nice. The game, which Bjornstjerna had very liberally given up to them, formed a good part of these refreshments, a few sheep—“really sheep this time,” the Captain observed,—with a good supply of rye-meal made into stirabout, formed the solids, and these, though, with the exception of the game, they did not grow in the forest, were easily procurable, for the families of the combatants, knowing that a party of English gentlemen were engaged in the skal, and rightly conjecturing that their hearts would be open, had brought their stores to the meet, and all of these stores were not exactly solids; the barrels on which the fiddlers were standing were intended for something better than rye-meal: in fact, corn brandy, and a hot fiery liquor which they make out of potatoes—very beastly to the taste, but quite as efficacious in producing drunkenness as the very best Cognac—was in plenty, and, the restrictions of the skal being at an end, there was every prospect that the men would fully indemnify themselves for their previous abstinence.