Finland, pause! If you wish to entice travellers to your shores, to bring strangers among you, keep your beautiful nature unspoiled, or, where change is absolutely necessary, try to imitate nature's own methods by using the glorious trees around you, instead of iron and tin shaped by man's hand; pause before you have murdered your natural loveliness by ghastly modernity, or you will be too late.
Attend to your sanitation if you will—that requires seeing to badly; provide more water and more towels for travellers who are accustomed to wash themselves in private, but don't imagine hideous modern erections will attract tourists, they but discourage them.
Imatra is glorious. Wallinkoski, the lower fall, is more picturesque, perhaps, but both are wonderful; they are worth journeying far to see, and holding in recollection for ever. We have nothing like them anywhere in Britain. The Falls of Foyers are as crumbs in a loaf of bread when compared with Imatra. The fall at Badgastein is as nothing beside Finland's great cataract; Hönefos in Norway a mere trifle. In Europe Imatra stands alone, with perhaps the exception of its solitary rival, Trollhättan in Sweden, the exquisite beauty of which is already marred by the sacrilegious hand of the Philistine.
Above all, Finland, you should not allow St. Petersburg to light her streets with your water power; there is enough water in Imatra to light half Europe—but keep it for yourselves, keep it as a pearl in a beautiful casket. Imatra is one of Finland's grandest possessions.
It seems impossible that salmon could live in such a cataract, but yet it is a fact that they do.
Verily, Finland is a paradise for fishermen. A paradise for lines and rods, reels and flies, for masters of the piscatorial art; there are to be found freshwater lakes, and glorious rivers full of fish. Some call it the heaven of anglers, and permission to fish can easily be obtained, and is absurdly inexpensive.
The best-known spot is Harraka, near Imatra, because the English Fishing Club from St. Petersburg found sport in those wonderful waters until they acquired Varpa Saari, an island a little farther down the river.
The Saimen Lake is about 150 miles long, and the river Vuoksen, which forms Imatra, joins this fishing water with the famous Ladoga, the largest lake in Europe, which again empties itself into the sea by the Neva. This is not a fishing-book, or pages might be written of happy hours spent with grayling or trout with a fly, or spinning from a boat with a minnow.
Kind reader, have you ever been driven in a Black Maria? That is, we believe, the name of the cumbersome carriage which conveys prisoners from one police-station to another, or to their prison home? We have; but it was not an English Black Maria, and, luckily, we were never anywhere taken from one police-station to another. Our Black Maria was the omnibus that plies between Imatra and Rättijärvi, some twenty miles distant, where we travelled in order to catch the steamer which was to convey us down the famous Saimen Canal back to our delightful Ilkeäsaari host, in time for the annual Johanni and the wonderful Kokko fires, more famous in Finland to-day than the Baal fires formerly were in Britain.
It was a beautiful drive; at least we gathered that it would have been a beautiful drive if we had not been shut up in the Black Maria. As it was, we were nearly jolted to death on the hardest of hard wooden seats, and arrived stiff, sore, and tired, with aching backs at Rättijärvi.