'Next morning, what a change has taken place! One old man is seated at the doorway, dozing over a chillum of ganjah. No other sign of life is visible in Rajah Guchpuch Rae's palace. The treasurer arrives first, opens and rubs his eyes, and asks the old man where the rajah and his people have gone? He replies that they decamped before dawn. In due course the Muhajuns, the jewellers, and birds of song arrive, but nothing of the rajah is to be found; and smoke-stained walls, and filth, and litter about the rooms, alone betray that revelry had been there! The jewellers and Muhajuns turn in wrath upon Lalla Umbeka Sahaee, and tax him with having aided to cheat them. They proceed first to abuse, and then to beat him. In vain the poor man shows the huge key, and laments his thousand rupees lost for ever. They drag him to the kotwal, and charge him with having cheated them; and the defrauded treasurer remains in durance vile for a week at least, and gets off at last on proving himself to be one of the victims of this system of swindling, and after feeing the police myrmidons pretty roundly.'
Here we close, without further remark, a book from which the reader will learn that the crimes of India are not remarkably different from those of earlier England, although fostered by the worst police system that ever disgraced and demoralised a country.
[TRACINGS OF THE NORTH OF EUROPE.]
GOTTENBURG TO CHRISTIANIA.
At six o'clock of the morning of the 4th July, Quist duly appeared with the carriage at the door of the Gotha Kellare. It was a dull, cool, drizzling morning, and I mentally rejoiced in having, against many advices, resolved upon a vehicle which could afford me protection from the elements. My baggage being arranged beside me in the carriage, so that I could readily command anything I wanted—one of the greatest of all comforts in solitary travelling—I hastily swallowed the cup of coffee presented to me in my bedroom—the common custom of the country—and was soon on the road to Christiania. I observed that two hardy little horses were yoked to the carriage with rope-traces. Beside Quist, who drove them, sat a man who was to bring back the cattle, the first of a long series of such persons whom I was to see in that situation during my journey, of all varieties of age, from twelve years to threescore, in all kinds of clothes, from stout wadmaal down to bare decency. The robust, bulky frame of honest Quist generally made these people appear like dwarfs by his side. As we drove rapidly along the swampy plain surrounding Gottenburg, we met an immense number of small market-carts, driven by peasant men or women, or both, generally very lightly laden, and going at a trot, the people being usually seated on a sort of chair, perched on elastic beams passing back at an angle from the beams of the vehicle, so as to give somewhat the effect of springs. I felt affected at seeing such a multitude of people engaged in a labour so uneconomical, and which must consequently remunerate them so ill; for of course where a man or woman give a day of their own time, along with a horse's labour, to the business of selling a single pig or lamb, a few chickens and eggs, or some such trifling merchandise, the remuneration must be of the most miserable kind. The poor too often struggle on in this manner, always busy, as they allege, often working very hard, and wondering that, with all their exertions, they make so little, when the plain truth is, that their labour is so ill-directed, or is so uneconomically conducted, and in the result of their labours they consequently do so little for their fellow-creatures, that their little gains are exactly what is to be expected, and what is strictly their due. The very best lesson that we could teach a poor man, with a view to improving his fortunes, would be that which led him, as far as possible, to extend his usefulness, to substitute economical for uneconomical labour, and to concentrate and divide employments. I beheld, with interest, in this exhibition of the Swedish peasantry, the first aspect of an economy out of which it has been the business of the last hundred years to reform the farming population of my own country.
At the first station, which we reached in little more than an hour, the horses which had been ordered were in waiting, along with a new loon of some kind to take care of them. The man in charge of the used horses was then paid at a rate which appeared nearly equivalent to threepence-halfpenny per English mile. But something more was needed—dricka-pinge, or drinks-money, as Quist called it. In England, something like half-a-crown would have been expected. In Sweden, a few skillings—about twopence of our money—was given, and most thankfully received. We then set out with our new horses. The station, it may be remarked, is a place like a carrier's inn. Travellers of a humble class may stop and refresh at it; but it expects no gentlemen customers, and is unprepared for their reception. One or two out of a long series are tolerable places, and it is necessary to calculate so as to have any needful meals there, instead of the meaner houses; but even with these better-sort of houses it is necessary to order meals by the forebud, for a guest is so rare, that they have no standing arrangements for his reception. My breakfast had been ordered at the third station. It proved a decent, plain house, with clean-boarded floors, and a few rude prints along the walls; and, had there been wheaten bread, the eggs and coffee would have enabled me to make a tolerable meal.
The country passed over to-day consisted of low rocky hills of soft outline, with alluvial plains between. It is impossible for any person of common powers of observation to fail to be struck with the appearance of the rocky surface presented around Gottenburg and along the road upon which I was now travelling. All the abruptnesses and asperities usually seen upon rocks are here ground off: all is smooth and rounded. Here you see great ridges, resembling the hull of a ship turned keel uppermost, both in the general form and the smoothness of surface. There you see great slopes, as straight and smooth as an ashlar wall. Sometimes a kind of trough or channel is seen between rising ridges, and of this the sides are usually quite smooth. In general, there has been a certain weathering of the exterior, though leaving the general plane—if I may use such an expression—in its original state. Where the surface has been from any cause protected from the elements, the smoothing is clearly seen to be a true mechanical polish; that is to say, not a result of some causes connected with the formation of the rock, but an effect proceeding from some external agent which has operated on the rocks after they had been thrown into their present arrangement as a surface for this part of the earth. On these preserved surfaces we find striæ or scratches, evidently a portion of the general operation, whatever it was; and these striæ, as well as the channellings and ridges, lie in one direction—namely, compass N. E. and S. W. In numberless instances in travelling to-day I took out my compass to test this point, where much struck by the appearances, and the result was invariable. The valley of the Gotha Elv lies from north to south; but this seems merely to have exposed it to being impressed with these singular appearances. There are several hill-faces which may be considered as an exception, being rough and cliffy, sometimes with a talus of débris descending from below the cliffy front, as in Salisbury Crags near Edinburgh. In all such instances the face of the cliff is to the south-west; and where this occurs in a valley, the opposite hill-face is invariably smooth, with rounded surfaces, showing as if the smoothing agent had moved from the north-east, failing to press against faces turned away from that point of the compass, but bearing hard upon such as were presented towards it. It was most impressive and interesting to read in these facts so strange a tale of grand preterite operations of nature. I had seen some of the few and scattered markings of the same kind which exist on the surface of my own country, but was nevertheless unprepared for the all but universal grinding to which Sweden has been subjected. In Scotland one has to seek for the appearances in nooks of the country; but here they are met at every step. Very often farm establishments, and the inns at which the traveller stops, are placed on smoothed plateaux of rock, the place thus acquiring from nature all the benefit of a paved courtyard, as well as of a perfectly firm and dry foundation. Often you can trace in these natural pavements the primitive channellings and striæ, though hob-nails and wagon-wheels have clattered over them for centuries.
The matter massed up against the smoothed valley-sides has all the appearance of that of moraines amongst the Alps. A moraine, as must be known by many persons, is the accumulation of loose matter which a glacier brings down in its course, and deposits at its base. The matter seen here, as at the skirts of the Alpine glaciers, is a coarse, pale, sandy clay, mixed with rough stones of all sizes up to many tons—mixed confusedly—with here and there little nests of matter, where the clay and sand have been separated and laid down by water. Over this matter in some places are stratified sand and gravel, coming to flat, terraced forms, like sea-beaches. These, however, are rare objects. The tendency of the whole appearances, in an unprejudiced mind, is to convey the idea that ice has been the cause of the main phenomena. That water in any form could have produced them is utterly inadmissible, though this was the supposition formed by the first scientific observer, M. Sefstrom. Persons who have only read descriptions of the appearances may think them explainable upon an aqueous theory; but if they visit Sweden, and look at the surface with their own eyes, they must, if open to conviction at all, see that no such agent could have produced such effects. Only some agent applying forcibly, pressingly, and with an equable, continuous motion—like a plane going over a deal, or a plough in a furrow—could have so dressed the original surface. Such an agent is ICE. The identity of the loose matter with the moraines of existing glaciers points to the same conclusion. I therefore believe, with M. Agassiz and others, that ice has been the means of smoothing the surface of Sweden—ice on a scale of grandeur beyond what we are accustomed to see; though how such a glacial sheet was originated, and how it could move across the whole irregular face of a large country, up hill and down hill, maintaining over wide provinces one direction, I think it would be difficult to explain. We perceive clearly the nature of the agent, and we see this agent still at work upon the earth, though in a limited manner: the only difficulty is as to the different physical circumstances on which depended the magnitude of the phenomenon and the manner of its application. The superficial arrangements of the loose matter speak of a subsequent dip under water, a fact of which I shall have occasion to show other evidences.