Our driver was presented to us as “Ole Mon;” and the English-speaking owner of the carriage informed us that Ole (“Olie”) Mon spoke fluently our tongue. He was a sturdily built, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed man some forty years of age with a gray moustache and smooth, weather-beaten face. He drove these tourists’ carriages in summer, he said; in the winter he took to the sea. We soon discovered his English to be limited to a few simple phrases, while when he ran to the end of his vocabulary he never hesitated to put in a fit Norwegian word. He was proud of his acquaintance with the foreign tongue, and delighted to exercise his knowledge of it. His chief concern in life was to take care of the ponies. He continually talked to them as though they were his boys, and at any excuse for a stop, always had nosebags filled with oat meal ready to slip on and give them a lunch. The ponies are not over eight or ten hands high, but are powerfully muscled, and they are as sleek and tame as kittens. We believe that we have a treasure in Ole Mon, and I expect to learn much from him about the country we traverse, for he is glib to talk.
The road was superb, the scenery magnificent. We followed a deep fertile valley, along a roaring river, the Etna Elv—recent rains having filled the streams brim full—with high fir-clad mountains rising sheer on either hand. We climbed gradually for quite twenty miles, meeting and passing many curious two-wheeled carts, drawn by a single horse, called stolkjaerres, in which the driver sits behind the passenger, and about four o’clock we halted at Tomlevolden, a rambling farmstead where Ole Mon put the nosebags on the ponies and we rested until the bags were emptied.
Here, we visited a dairy cow barn,—a large airy building finished in planed lumber, with long rows of stalls where the cows face each other, standing on raised floors and with a wide middle aisle where the feeders pass down between. So scrupulously clean was it that each day it must be washed out and scrubbed. In one end stood a big stone furnace, a sort of oven, to keep the cattle warm through the dark cold winter time, and fresh spring water was piped to a little trough set at each stall.
Some years ago, having spent the night at a West Virginia mountain farm, in middle winter, I looked out of the window in the morning and beheld the family cow with about a foot of snow piled on her back and belly-deep in an icy drift. I remarked, “It has snowed some in the night.” Mine host replied that “he reckoned it had.” And then talking of the snow, I told him that I had seen snow eight feet deep way up in Canada. He looked at me incredulously and inquired, “Say, what mought the cows do in such snow as that.” Would that I might show him and his like this Norwegian cow barn!
Then we went on till 7 p. m., when we reached the famous Sanatorium of Tonsaasen, almost at the summit of the long grade, a spacious wooden hotel overlooking a profound dal, down which plunges a cascade.
The hotel is kept by a big, bustling woman who speaks perfect cockney English, and who tells us she has “lived in Lonnon, although a native Norwegian.” She wears a large white apron and a white lace cap, and she has received H in most motherly fashion. Indeed, our coming has greatly piqued her curiosity. She has asked us many questions and has taken H aside and inquired confidentially whether I am not a deserting soldier, and whether she is not eloping with me! She is evidently alert for military scandal, and was sorely disappointed and half incredulous when H declared that she and I were really man and wife. The truth is, Norway is become the retreat for so many runaway couples, recreant husbands and truant wives, that the good people of these caravansaries are quite ready to add you to the list of shady episodes. Even when I boldly wrote several postal cards to America and handed them to mine hostess to mail, I felt sure that after she had carefully read them she would scarcely yet believe our tale.
Here we were given a bounteous supper of eggs, coffee, milk, cream, chicken, hare, trout, five sorts of cheese, and big hot rolls, and all for thirty-five cents each. The ponies were also fed again, and at eight o’clock we moved on twelve miles further, crossing the divide and rolling down into the valley of the Baegna Elv in the long twilight, and then brilliant starlight, coming at last to a typical Norwegian inn, at Frydenlund, not far from the lovely Aurdals Vand. This is the main road in winter between Bergen and Kristiania, and is then more traveled by sleighs and sledges than even now by carriages. All along the way there are frequent inns and post-houses. To-morrow we start at eight o’clock, and go on sixty-one miles more.
FEEDING THE PONIES, TOMLEVOLDEN.
&
CHURCH OF VESTRE SLIDRE.
Our inn is a roomy farmhouse where “entertainment is kept,” even as it used to be along the stage-traversed turnpikes of old Virginia, and adjoining it are extensive barns and stables. There seemed to be many travelers staying the night. We are really at an important point, for here two state highways separate, the one over which we have come leading to Odnaes, and the other diverging southward toward Lake Spirillen and the country known as the Valders, continuing on straight through to Kristiania. The house is painted white, and has about it an air quite like a farmstead in New England or New York. We were expected when we arrived. Word of our coming had been telephoned from Tonsaasen, and also from Kristiania. A large bedroom on the second story is given us. The floor is painted yellow and strips of rag carpet are laid beside the narrow bedsteads, where we sleep under eider down. I am writing by the light of a home-made candle. It is late, the silence of the night is unbroken save by the ticking of the tall clock on the staircase landing outside my door, and the occasional neighing of a horse or lowing of a cow. It is the silence of the contented country-side.