ALONG THE ETNA ELV.
HAILING OUR STEAMER, THE RAND FJORD.
VI.
A Day Upon the Rand Fjord and Along the Etna Elv—To Frydenlund—Ole Mon Our Driver.
Frydenlund, Norge, September 1, 1902.
We left Kristiania about seven o’clock this morning and drove six kilometers to Grefsen, a suburb where the new railway comes in, which will ultimately connect the capital with Bergen on the west coast. Grefsen is up on the hills back of the city. The cars of the train we traveled in were long like our own and also set on trucks, the compartments being commodious, like the one we rode in from Helsingborg.
We traversed a country of spruce forests, rapid streams, small lakes and green valleys; with red-roofed farmsteads, cattle, sheep and horses in the meadows, and yellowing fields of oats and rye, just now being reaped; where men were driving the machines and women raking the fallen grain, all a beautiful, fertile, well-populated land with big men, big women, rosy and well set up, usually yellow-haired and blue-eyed.
About ten o’clock we arrived at Roikenvik, on the Rand Fjord, a sheet of dark blue water about two miles wide and thirty or forty long, with high, fir-clad mountains on either hand; with green slopes dotted with farm buildings, and occasional hamlets where stopped our tiny steamboat, the Oscar II. This fjord is more beautiful than a Scottish loch, for here the mountains are heavily timbered with fir to their very summits, while the hills of Scotland are bare and bleak.