There are several fine museums and picture galleries in Sweden. The national gallery in Stockholm, which is across the bay from the royal palace, and the Northern Museum founded in 1872 by Dr. Hazelius. Then there is the Royal Opera and the National Theater, so that the people of Stockholm do not want for places of amusement in winter as well as summer.
The father of athletic sports in Sweden is Lieutenant Colonel Victor Gustaf Balck, who holds a military position in the garrison at Stockholm. He introduced lawn tennis, cricket, baseball and football, and has established numerous athletic clubs in different parts of the country. Sailing is popular, there being many yacht clubs with good houses and fleets. And swimming is a part of the national education, nearly every man, woman, and child in Sweden taking naturally to the water and being able to swim. Everybody can skate as well as swim. In the cities rinks can be found with music and many conveniences. In Stockholm there is a general skating club, with a rink large enough to accommodate six thousand skaters, and popular fêtes given there at intervals during the winter are attended by the royal family and members of the court, and are regarded as important social functions. All skating is done upon the numerous lakes, and often during the long nights of the winter hundreds of people, young and old, will gather at an early hour—it gets dark at four o'clock in the afternoon—and spend the entire night skating by moonlight. A big fire is built in some convenient place for the crowd, and smaller fires by individual parties, who bring luncheon with them and have a picnic in the snow in the winter. In various parts of the country, national and international skating contests are held, and winners in local tournaments, both for speed and fancy skating, are sent to Stockholm to contest for the grand prizes against the crack skaters of Norway, Denmark, Russia, and northern Germany.
But the national winter sport of all Scandinavia is skeeing—skimming over the snow on snow-shoes. There is no more vigorous or exciting exercise. In the country districts men and women alike are educated to the use of snowshoes from childhood. As soon as boys and girls are old enough to skate, they put on skees of a size appropriate to their stature, and are quite as agile and daring as their elders. It requires nerve, skill, and muscular strength to skee, and a person who has never tried snow-shoes always finds it difficult to use them. It is a sport to which people must be trained from childhood. A skilful "skeer" can make a mile in two minutes.
Ice yachting and sailing on skates are two of the oldest and most popular national sports, and are practiced in both Sweden and Norway by all classes. All the ice yachts and snow-shoes are home-made, and in the country districts many of the skates.[p]
CHAPTER XVII
THE NEWSPAPERS OF NORWAY AND SWEDEN
There are seven hundred and fifty-one newspapers and periodicals in Sweden, including fifty-two dailies. Stockholm has twelve dailies, seven published in the morning and five in the evening, which is a large number for a city of three hundred and ten thousand inhabitants, and the wonder is how they all manage to exist. None of them is as large as the ordinary dailies in the United States. It is the practice of the Swedish editors to waste very little room in headlines, and to condense as much as possible. They state facts without padding or comment, and manage to bring the daily allowance of news within ten or twelve columns. There is usually a continued story, three or four articles of a literary character, a couple of columns of clippings and miscellany, and the same amount of editorial. The balance of the paper is given up to advertising, but with all that it is seldom necessary to print more than four pages. The morning papers stick to the blanket sheet.
Most of the Stockholm papers have a good advertising patronage, which runs to display at times. The Swedish business men have learned that it pays to advertise. The rates are much lower than in the United States. The ordinary want ad. costs from seven to ten cents, and for display advertisements the rates run from two and one-half to twenty cents a line, according to the location. In the semi-weekly edition of Aftonbladet, which is considered the best advertising medium in Sweden on account of its large circulation and superior class of readers, display ads. in preferred places cost about twenty-eight cents a line.
The subscription price corresponds. You can have any one of the evening papers delivered at your house for $3 a year, and the highest rate for the morning dailies is $5 a year. It is worth while to know that postmasters in Sweden will receive subscriptions for newspapers published in any part of the world. A small fee is exacted to cover the amount of postage and the stationery required in forwarding the subscription.
The father of cheap newspapers in Sweden is Anders Jeurling, the publisher of Stockholm-Tidningen and Hyvad Nytt i Dag, who started the first-named journal about twelve years ago and sold it on the street for two öre, which is about one-half cent. Now the price of the former is four öre, about one cent, and of the latter a half cent. The former paper has the largest circulation in the city of Stockholm, its ordinary edition reaching about one hundred thousand copies, but Aftonbladet exceeds it in the country. Mr. Jeurling has the reputation of being the ablest publisher in Sweden, and is a better business man than the editor. He has made a fortune out of his papers on the theory that the people care more for news than for politics. Mr. Adolph Hallgren is the editor-in-chief of Stockholms-Tidningen, and the managing editor is Mr. F. Zethraens, who studied journalism in the office of the Chicago Record-Herald.