To her Niece, Blanche Lewes (aged 6).
I was so pleased by your sending me the little bunch of roses in Mama’s letter. I was glad to hear of your moving to Elm Cottage. I fancy it is very pretty. I hope you and Maud like being there.
I suppose you very often go to see Aunt Margaret. You would be interested to see the way we travel here. There is thick snow on the ground; and we go on sledges,—that is carriages that have no wheels, but go easily in the snow. They go very fast.
The other day we started before it was light. The moon was shining brightly; there was a little light in the sky where the sun would rise. Miss Yorke and I sat in a sledge, which is so low that one feels almost on the ground.
The driver had on a great fur coat, a fur cap, and great fur gloves. He looked like a picture of a Laplander; but we had a horse, not a reindeer, to draw us. There was another sledge behind us with our luggage. I couldn’t think why the white horse that was drawing it kept coming and rubbing his nose against my shoulder; and I thought, too, that it was a little frisky sometimes. When it got excited, it seemed to prance about a good deal; and I wondered why the driver let it.
But soon we saw that the good little creature was being trusted to follow without any driver at all.
He followed for twelve miles, till we changed horses, over the mountain and over the wide tracts of snow, where the road was only marked by posts which stood up from the snow; and through the quiet little mountain villages, where the people were just waking and coming out to cut a way through the snow to their cow-houses or wood-sheds.
Every now and then the driver of our sledge turned back and called, “Cieco, Cieco” to the horse; and he trotted up, and rubbed his nose against my shoulder. We met the peasants walking. It was hard work in the snow; even where our horse had been, it was over their knees. One boy had a little dog with him; he wanted to keep it out of the snow, and had buttoned it into his coat in front; its little head looked so funny, wagging in front of his chest. We went up over the mountains where there were no more houses, and hardly any peasants to be seen, only just snow-covered mountains, and fir trees loaded with snow, and all the streams were covered or edged with icicles, some of them as tall as a cottage.
There used to be wolves there; but I suppose there are none now. It was strangely solitary; so much so that we saw two pretty chamois going over the snow together into a fir wood. They left pretty footprints in the snow. There wasn’t another road going in the same direction for a hundred miles; so, though it was so high and cold and snowy, the people have to go over it all the winter. It was very beautiful to see the sun rise, and the snow on them looked quite rose-coloured in the light. We drove fifty miles in sledges that day. The people here all have a little ground, and they plant what they want to eat and to wear too: and they hardly ever buy anything in shops. Their cows and goats and fowls give them milk and eggs and cheese and milk; and their sheep provide them with wool; and they have flax and hemp, and the women spin and weave it; and they make it in the winter; and they make even the leather for their shoes at home from the skins of animals. Very little corn ripens here; it is not warm enough; but they make great racks, like gigantic towel rails, with numbers of rails twice as high as the houses; and there the little corn that they have and their hay are placed, that they may get sun and wind and ripen and dry.
They are very fond of their country, and have fought for it several times.