Taking a boat at Bergen, we devoted eleven hours to winding about through Hardanger Fjord, and every moment presented some new attraction. These fjords seem to have been formed by a convulsion that opened great cracks in the mountains which line the coast of Norway. In some places the shores are precipitous cliffs, reaching from the water upwards for hundreds of feet, but for most of the way the banks slope back and are covered with stunted pines and undergrowth. Scattered all along the way are innumerable cascades and waterfalls, varying in width from a few inches to many feet. At one place we counted eleven of these in sight at one time, and we were never out of hearing of their music. Some of them are harnessed to little sawmills. At one point the boat halted within a few hundred yards of a great glacier, which is crawling down a mountain gorge, and from whose mouth, as from a fountain, gushes a ceaseless stream. For ages this mass of ice has been slowly moving down from the mountains, and every day tons upon tons melt and disappear, but its losses at its base are made good at its top, and it lives on like the human race, ever dying and yet ever young.
Disembarking at Eide we took a four-hours carriage ride, following a mountain stream to its source, crossing the range at an elevation of a thousand feet and descending along another stream to the lake upon which the village of Voss is situated. From this point a scenic railroad, which passes through fifty-two tunnels in seventy miles, took us back to Bergen. As might be gathered from what has already been said, Norway does not impress the tourist as a farmer's paradise, although agriculture is first among her industries. The farms, as seen from the routes of travel, seem very diminutive and are usually triangular in form and look like wedges inserted in the cracks of the mountains. Occasionally a valley is broad enough to invite the cultivation of a level piece of land and the invitation was long ago accepted. Potatoes grow well in Norway and are of excellent flavor. On the coast boats they furnished the staple, and sometimes almost the only, vegetable, although the bill of fare often included seven different kinds of fish, nearly as many varieties of cold meat, half as many brands of cheese, besides white, brown and black bread. Rye, barley and wheat are grown in the southern districts and grass everywhere. Owing to the frequent showers and the long days of summer, grass grows very rapidly, but as it is difficult to cure it, the people have adopted a plan which looks peculiar to foreigners. They build frames that look like sections of a fence and the green hay is hung upon the boards or wire as the case may be. The lower rows are protected from the rain by the upper one, and the air has access to all of it.
About three hours' drive from Bergen there is a little wooded island on which the great Norwegian violinist, Ole Bull, built a summer home where he was wont to retire at the conclusion of his tours and where at last he died. He was not only a great admirer of American institutions and of the American people in general, but he married an American, and his daughter returns to Norway every year to celebrate May 17, Norway's independence day, at her father's home and with her father's countrymen. The daughter is one of the many connecting links between the two countries, and by her invitation, extended through our consul, Mr. Cunningham, we had the privilege of visiting this historic spot. We were glad to do so, because Ole Bull was not only one of the great musicians of the last century, but he was one of the greatest democrats that Norway has produced—a democrat not in a partisan sense, but in that broader sense in which it describes one who believes in the people, trusts them and labors for their welfare.
OLE BULL.
There are many public men in Norway worthy of mention, but space forbids an enumeration of them. There is, however, a relic of great historic interest to which I must devote a line. It is the Viking Ship, a thousand years old, now on exhibition at Christiania. It was dug up twenty-five years ago and is fairly well preserved. It gives one an idea of the ships used by those early seamen of the north whose daring exploits make fiction seem tame.
It so happened that we arrived in Norway just in time to attend the coronation of King Haakon VII., and we had our first opportunity to see royalty on parade. The new king is a son of the king of Denmark, and his wife, Queen Maud, is daughter of the king of England. When, last year, Norway withdrew from her union with Sweden, the crown was offered to a son of King Oscar, but the offer was refused, and it is probably not too much to say that the Norwegians expected it to be refused, but they wanted to show that separation was not due to antagonism to the reigning house. It was then tendered to the son of King Frederick and accepted. I shall speak later of the circumstances which explain this selection; it is sufficient at present to say that the new king is a sober, earnest, sensible looking young man of about thirty-five and seems to have made a very favorable impression upon the Norwegian people. By the courtesy of Minister Graves, who represents our country at Stockholm, and who, our minister to Norway not having received his appointment in time, was our nation's special ambassador to attend the coronation, we received invitations to the coronation ceremonies and were presented at court. While the newspaper reports of the coronation may rob what I am about to say of some of its freshness as news, I shall venture to describe what we saw, begging the reader's indulgence if I betray a lack of familiarity with the technical phrases employed on such occasions.
The coronation took place at Trondhjem, the former capital, a city situated on one of the numerous fjords that indent the western coast. The building selected for the occasion was the Gothic cathedral, the largest in Scandinavia, which was commenced in the eleventh, and completed in the fourteenth century. It is a historic building and belonged to the Bishopric of which Ireland was a part before America was discovered by Columbus. The cathedral has suffered from several fires, and a part of it was in ruins for three centuries. It is now sufficiently restored to furnish a larger audience room than is to be found in most cities of the size. Under the dome a circular space was left for the royal party while the visitors were seated, the foreign representatives nearest the center, on raised seats in the nave and transepts. A broad aisle was left, extending from the entrance through the center to the chapel at the other end. Just before time for the king to arrive, a company of white-robed Lutheran priests marched from the chapel to the door, and a stalwart body of men they were. They marched back at the head of the procession, the king following, his crimson, ermine-lined robe trailing many feet behind—or it would have trailed but for the fact that it was carried by four attendants. The king was accompanied by several officers and followed by the standard bearer holding aloft the royal banner. Then came the queen wearing a robe similar to the king's, but it only required three attendants to keep its folds from the floor. She was attended by three maids of honor. The king and queen were escorted to thrones on opposite sides of the aisle, and the representatives of royal families occupied seats next to them. The Prince of Wales sat nearest the queen, next to him Prince Henry of Germany, and the American ambassador next. Near the king sat Denmark's representative, then Russia's, and next to him the representative from France. There was gold braid galore; some of the foreign representatives had enough on their clothes to put the Sultan of Sulu to shame. I never before saw so much gold, and I have been wondering since whether there may not be a new yellow peril of which our financiers have little dreamed. Our representatives used less of this ornamentation (they all wore military uniforms) than those of any other country, and the question arises, what is going to become of the honest dollar if, with the spread of the ideas of a republic, the amount of gold braid is decreased and a vast quantity of gold is poured through the mints into the volume of the world's currency? It might so enlarge the volume of money as to make the money changers clamor for the demonetization of gold, and, then the silverites would be called gold bugs for insisting upon the free and unlimited coinage of gold.