Through Finland in Carts

by Mrs. Alec-Tweedie

We thoroughly enjoyed that evening meal, sitting on the balcony, or rather large porch of the little annexe kept for strangers; one and all agreed no nicer butter, sweeter milk, or more perfect cream—of which they brought us a quart jug—could be found anywhere, and that travellers must indeed be hard to please who could not live for a few days on such excellent farm produce, even though they might have to dispense with the luxuries of fish, flesh, and fowl.

Three A.M. is a little early to turn out of bed, but when one is travelling through the wilds one must do many trying things, so we all got up at that hour, which, judging by our feelings, seemed to us still midnight. The sun, however, was of a different opinion, he was up and shining brilliantly long before any of us.

We had previously told our Finnish student the joke of having tried to order hot water over night, and, after much explanation and many struggles to make her understand, how the girl had returned with a teacup full of the boiling liquid, and declared that the greatest trouble we were forced to encounter in Finland was to get any water to wash with, more especially warm.

He smiled, but was not daunted. We heard him up early, and imagined he was arranging things with the coachman and ordering breakfast—for we cannot ever be sufficiently grateful to our Finnish friends for their kindness and thoughtfulness in managing everything for our comfort from the first day of our stay in Finland till the last; but he had done more than this, and apparently made up his mind that we should never, while he travelled with us, have cause to accuse Finland again of being unable to produce Hett vatten!

At three A.M. a knock came at the door—a most unusual form of proceeding in a country where every one walks in without this preliminary—and, having opened it in reply, we found a buxom maid standing with an enormous jug of boiling water, and a yet more enormous wooden pail, such as one might require for a family wash, full of the same boiling liquid, and a tub outside the door from which volumes of steam were rising. It was for the English ladies, she said.

Our student had paid us out, and we felt ashamed and sorry.

As we sat at breakfast we watched a girl drawing water from the well. Every house in Finland, be it understood, has its well, over which is a raised wooden platform something like a table with a hole in the middle for the bucket to pass through. A few feet back a solid pillar stands on the ground, through the fork-like top of which a pine-tree trunk is fixed, generally about thirty feet long. It is balanced in such a way that at the one end of it a large stone is tied to make it heavy, while suspended from a fine point, standing in mid-air, appear a series of wooden posts joined together by iron hasps so as to form a long chain or cord, to the bottom end of which the bucket is attached. Thus the bucket with its wooden string is, when filled with water, equivalent in weight to the stone at the other end of the pump. In fact, the whole thing is made on the principle of a pair of scales.

The girl seized the empty bucket, pulled it over the hole, and, hanging on to the jointed poles with all her weight, sent the bucket down some thirty feet into the well below. By this time the stone at the far end of the pole was up in mid-air. When she thought the bucket was full she let go, and immediately it began to rise at the same time as the stone at the other end began to descend, and in a moment the beautiful well-water reached the surface. Such pumps as these are to be found all over Finland, and their manufacture seems a speciality of the country.

We had considerable fun over the coffee cups at breakfast, for every one of them had written round its border love passages and mottoes in Finnish—another instance of how the love of proverbs and mottoes is noticeable everywhere throughout the country. Our gentleman friends had great jokes over these inscriptions, but they unkindly refused to tell us what they really meant.

We had learnt a good deal of Finnish from sheer necessity, and could manage to order coffee or milk, or to pay what was necessary, but our knowledge of the language did not go far enough for us to understand the wonderful little tales printed round the coffee cups from which we drank. Again we were given silver spoons.