KARL JOHANS GADE, KRISTIANIA.
About 4 p. m., we dined at the small station of Ed, our first example of Swedish railway dinner-serving on an elaborate scale. The train was a long one. There were many passengers. The fish and cheese consumed at Gothenburg was long since shaken down. We were genuinely hungry. But when the train came to a stop there was no rush to the restaurant, nor attempt of every man to get ahead of the one in front of him. The passengers took their leisure to get out, and walked deliberately toward the big eating room. The food was set upon a long central table. There were hot soups, hot boiled fowl, hot meats, an abundance of victuals, cold and salt. There were piles of plates, of napkins and of knives and forks. Everyone helped himself, and ate standing or carried his food to a little table and sat at ease. This latter plan we followed. Rule: Eat all you will, drink as much beer as you desire, take your own time, the train will wait, and when you are quite satisfied pay a single kroner (twenty-seven cents). There is no watching to see how much you may consume. You eat your fill, you pay the modest charge, you go your deliberate way. However slow you may be the train will wait!
We now traversed a barren country of marshy flats; with skimp timber, chiefly small birch and spruce. Toward dusk it was raining hard. The long twilight had fairly begun when we crossed the Swedish border and a few miles beyond stopped at Fredrikshald, where is a famous fortress against the Swedes, besieging which, King Charles XII was killed. Here a customs’ officer walked rapidly through the car, asked a few questions and passed us on. Our trunks had been marked “through” from Helsinoere, so we had no care for them until we should arrive in Kristiania. But that there should be still maintained a customs’ line between the sister kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, which are ruled by a common King, may perhaps surprise the stranger unacquainted with the peculiar and somewhat strained relations ever existing between these kindred peoples.
VEGETABLE MARKET, KRISTIANIA.
For many hundreds of years (since 1380) Norway had been a province of Denmark. Her language and that of the Dane had grown to be almost the same, the same when written and printed, and differing only when pronounced. But in 1814, the selfish powers of the Holy Alliance handed over Norway to the Swedish crown as punishment to Denmark for being Napoleon’s friend, and threatened to enforce their arbitrary act by war. So Norway yielded to brute force, and accepted the sovereignty of Napoleon’s treacherous Marshal Bernadotte, the Swedish King, but she yielded nothing more, and to this day has preserved and yet jealously maintains her own independent Parliament, her own postal system, her own separate currency and her Custom Houses along the Swedish line. And you never hear a Norwegian speak of any other than of the “King of Sweden.” “He is not our King,” they say, “we have none.” “We are ruled by the King of Sweden, but Norway has no King.” Cunning Russia, it is said, cleverly spends many rubles in order that this independent spirit shall be kept awake, and the war force of Sweden thereby be so much weakened. Russia might even to this day be able to nourish into war this ancient feud between the kindred breeds, if it were not that in her greed of power she has shown the cloven foot. The horror of her monstrous tyranny in Finland already finds echo among the Norwegian mountains. “We are getting together,” a Norwegian said to me. “We have got to get together, however jealous we may be of one another. We must, or else the Russian bear will hug us to our death, even as now he is cracking the ribs of helpless Finland.” And when I suggested that little Denmark should be taken within the pale, and a common Scandinavian Republic be revived in more than ancient force to face the world, he declared that already a movement toward this end was set afoot, and only needed a favorable opportunity to become a living fact.
At 11 p. m. we arrived at Kristiania in a pouring rain, and at General C’s recommendation, came to this curious and comfortable hotel. Like many other hotels in Norway, it is kept by women, and seems to be much patronized by substantial Norwegians of the nicer sort. It is on the top floor of a tall building, and you pass up and down in a rapid modern elevator. It is kept as clean as a pin, and the beds we sleep in are the softest, freshest in mattress and linen we have seen this side the sea. We have also passed beyond the latitude of blankets and are come to the zone of eider down. Coverlets, light, buoyant, and delightfully warm now keep us from the cold, and in our narrow bedsteads we sleep the slumber of contented innocence. We have a large well-furnished chamber, all for two kroner per day (fifty-four cents). When we entered the long, light breakfast hall this morning, we saw a single table running the length of the room, a white cloth upon it, and ranged up and down, a multitude of cheeses big and little, cow cheese and goat cheese, and many sorts of cold meat, beef and pork and mutton, and cold fish and salt fish. And there were piles of cold sliced bread and English “biscuits” (crackers). The coffee, or milk if you wish it, is brought in, and in our case so are fresh soft-boiled eggs. A group of evidently English folk near us had a special pot of Dundee marmalade. The Norwegians take simply their coffee or milk, with cheese and cold fish and the cold bread. Our breakfast cost us twenty cents apiece.
