If any one wants to see a poor, ragged, diminutive, wizened, yet jolly race of human beings,—a race of beings who wear hairy garments, sup reindeer’s milk with wooden spoons, and dwell in big bee-hives,—he has only got to go to Lapland and see the Lapps.
Quitting the carts at the outskirts of the village, the travellers advanced into the centre of it just as the natives were driving a herd of reindeer into an enclosure to be milked.
There could not have been fewer than three hundred reindeer-stags, does, and numerous fawns; and these, they afterwards learned, constituted the entire wealth of three families of Lapps.
As Fred and his friends strode into the enclosure, and came upon these good people rather suddenly, their amazement was unspeakable at finding they had bagged a party of giants along with their deer. Even scraggy Sam Sorrel looked quite big compared with them.
After the first gaze and shout of surprise, they crowded round the strangers, and they all—men, women, and children—began to eye and paw them over, and to examine their costumes with deep interest. The diminutive size of the Lapps became very apparent as they were thus engaged. None of the men were much, if at all, above five feet, several were considerably under that height, and the women were short in proportion.
If the bosoms of these Lapps were small, their hearts must certainly have been very large, for they received their visitors with great warmth and delight. Altogether they were a jovial and hearty, though uncommonly ill-dressed race of mortals.
The men were clothed partly in deer-skin, partly in coarse cloth, and these garments were reduced by long service to a uniform dirty-brown colour. They showed signs of being slept in by night as well as worn by day.
There was a schoolmaster amongst them. Only fancy, a Lapp schoolmaster, four feet nine or ten inches high! Sam Sorrel took a sketch of this gentleman on the spot, with his wife and child. What the schoolmaster taught, or whom he taught, or when or where he taught, are questions to which Fred could obtain no answer. To look at him, one would have imagined that eating, sleeping, and herding reindeer were the only lessons that he was able to teach. Yet it was found on inquiry that some of them could read Norse; and Sam actually discovered an old man in one of the huts poring over a New Testament in that language. There seemed something strangely incongruous in all this. They were dirty and uncouth; they had no houses, no tables or chairs, no civilised habits of any kind; yet they could read, and they had a schoolmaster! A very dirty one, to be sure, and not very deeply learned, I dare say; still a dominie, without doubt. On the strength of their acquirements, Fred presented the tribe with a Norse New Testament.
Besides being four feet ten, the schoolmaster was comical and quizzical. He was evidently the wit of his tribe. His face was yellow and dirty; his nose was short and red, in addition to which it was turned up at the point; his eyes were small, and sloped downwards at the inner corners towards the nose, like those of the Chinese. His dirty leathern tunic was belted so low down, and his little legs were so short, that there was considerably more of him above the belt than below it. On his head he wore a cap, somewhat like that of a jockey in shape, and his lower limbs were encased in tight but ill-fitting leggings. Altogether, this man was the most disreputable-looking schoolmaster that was ever seen either at home or abroad.
While both parties were making acquaintance with each other, the rain fell more heavily.