Glimpses of Three Coasts

dinavie sent up to know if we would do him the honor to drive down to the stea

ng her hand; we lifted up our bouquets, and waved them to her, and smiled our thanks. Katrina sprang up, with my cloak on her arm, to the coachman's seat. "I tink I go down too," she exclaimed, "I see you all safe;" and so we drove off, with as much smiling and bowing and "fare-welling" as if we had been cousins and aunts of everybody in the Scandinavie. How we did hate to leave our great corner rooms, with five windows in them, the fifth window being across the corner, which is not a right-angled corner, but like a huge b

culture of flowers makes it the most natural thing in the world for the Norwegian, when he travels, to be carrying along something in the shape of a plant. He is either taking it home or carrying it as a gift to some one he is going to visit. I have not yet been on a steamboat where I did not see at least a dozen potted plants, of one sort or another, being carefully carried along, as hand luggage, by men or women; and as for bouquets, they are almost as common as hats and bonnets. Of the potted plants, five out of seven will be green myrtles, and usually the narrow leaf. There is a re

a hole in the middle, fits down around these peaks so tight that the box is safely lifted by this handle; and, as I say, everything that a Norwegian woman wants to carry, she puts into her tine (pronounced, "teener"). Some of them are painted in gay colors; others are left plain. Setting down the box, she opened it, and proceeded to sprinkle with water one of the most beautiful wreaths I have ever seen,-white lilies, roses, and green myrtle. I think it came from a wedding; but as she knew no English, and I no Norwegian, I could not f

t of a country scores of miles, slips under several narrow strips of land one after the other, making lakes between them, it is entitled to be called something more than plain bay; but I wish it had been a word easier to pronounce. I never could say "fjord," when I read the w

nd islands unnumbered, which deceive the eye continually, seeming to be themselves the shore. We left Christiania at two o'clock; at that hour the light on a Norway summer day is like high noon in other parts of the world,-in fact, it's noon till four o'clock in the afternoon, and then it is afternoon

e sailors carried them off and on their backs, one set standing still in their places to lift the bags up on their comrades' backs; they lifted with a will, and then folded their arms and waited till the bag-carriers came back to be loaded up again. If I could have spoken Norwegian, I should have asked whether those sets of men took turn and turn about, or whether one set always lifted up the loads and the others lugged them,-probably the latter. That's the way it is in life; but I never saw a more striking example of it than in the picture these sailors made standing with folded arms doing nothing, waiting till their fellows came back again to be loaded down like beasts of burden. It was at "Moss" we saw this,-a pretty name for a little town with a handful of gay-colored houses, red, yellow, and white, set in

e were sailing through a bridge right into the town, in a narrow canal,-we could have thrown an apple into the

r is a mongrel meal of nobody knows how many kinds of sausage, raw ham, raw smoked salmon, sardines, and all varieties of cheese. The Danish we found much better, having the addition of hot fish, and cutlets,

e whole outer circumference of the water; and while we were looking at this, all of a sudden we were not in an open sea at all, but in among islands again, and slowly coming to a stop between two stretches of lovely shore,-big solid green fields like America's on one side, and a low promontory of mossy rocks on the other. A handful of houses, with one large and conspicuous one in the ce

aight in comparison with the huddling of corners and angles in Scandinavian gables and ridges and chimneys and attics. Add to this freaky and fantastic and shifting shape the beauty of color and of fine regularity of small curves in the red tile, and you have got as it were a mid-air world of beauty by itself. As I was studying out the points where these box-plaited dormer windows set into their roof, the same polite Norwegian voice said to a friend by his side, "I have read it over twenty-five ones." He pronounced the word read

wn. Latitude plays strange pranks with sunsets and sunrises. Norway, I think, must be the only place in the world where you could mistake one

not only narrow and rounding, but harder than it would have seemed possible that anything in shape of tufted upholstered velvet could be. We began to ache in spots; the ache spread: we ached all over; we could neither toss, twist, nor turn on the summit of this narrow tumulus. Misery set in; indignation and restlessness followed; seasickness, in addition, seemed for once a trifle. The most indefatigable member of the party, being also the most fatigued, succeeded at last in procuring a half-dozen small square pillows,-one shade less hard than the sofa, she thought when she first lay down on them, but long before morning she began to wonder whether they were not even harder. Such a night lingers long in one's memory; it was a closing chapter to our experience of Norwegian beds,-a fitting climax, if anything so small could be properly called a climax. How it has ever come about that the Norwegian notion of a bed should be so restricted, I am at a loss to imagine. They are simply child's cribs,-no more; as short as narrow, a

e tone in which each inquired eagerly of each, "Did you ever know such beds?" At ten we were anchored off the little

own age, is it not? Nobody can tell within a hundred or two of years anything about it so long as the tree can hold its head up. The circumference of this tree is said to be forty-two feet four feet from the ground,-a pretty respectable tree, considering the size of Denmark itself. Now we begin to see where the old Vikings got the oak to build their ships. They carried it up from Denmark, which must have been in those days a great forest of beech and oak to have kept so many till now. It is only a few miles from Frederikssund, also, to Havelse, which is celebrated for its "kitchen middings,"-the arch?ological name for kitchen refuse which got buried up hundreds of years ago. Even potato parings become highly important if you keep them long enough! They will at least establish the fact that somebody ate potatoes at that date; and all things hang together so in this queer world that there is no telling how much any one fact m

ough every custom-house I have ever seen. A commissionnaire with a shining beaver hat stood on the shore to meet us, we having been passed on with "recommendations" from the kindly people of the Scandinavie in Christiania to the King of Denmark Hotel people in Copenhagen. Nothing is so comfortable in travelling as to be waited for by your landlord. The difference between arriving unlooked for and arriving as an expected customer is about like the difference between arriving at the house of a friend and arriving at that of an enemy. The commissionaire had that pathetic air of having seen better days which is so universal in his class. One would think that the last vocation in the world which a "decayed" gentleman would choose would be that of showing other gentlemen their way about cities; it is only to be explained by the same morbid liki

chitectural monstrosity in the city,-not one; and many of the buildings have an excellent tone of quiet, conventional decoration which is pleasing to the eye. The brick-work particularly is well done; and simple variations of design are effectively used. You see often recurring over doorways and windows terra-cotta reproductions of some of Thorwaldsen's popular figures; and they are never marred by anything fantastic or bizarre in cornice or moulding above or around them. Among the most noticeable of the modern blocks are some built for the dwellings of poor people. They are in short streets leading to the Reservoir, and having therefore a good sweep of air through them. They are but two stories and a half high, pale yellow brick, neatly finished; and each house has a tiny dooryard filled with flowers. There are three tenements to a house, each having three rooms. The expression of these rows of gay little yellow houses with red roofs and flower-filled dooryards and windows, and each doorway bearing its two or three signs of trade or artisanry, was enough to do one's heart good. The rents are low, bringing the tenements within easy reach of poor people's purses. Yet there is evidently an obligation-a certain sort of social standard-involved in the neighborhood which will keep it always from squalor or untidiness. I d

leasing contrast to the old part of the building, although every effort has been made to copy the style of it exactly. It is long, and not high, the wall divided into spaces by carved pilasters between every two windows. Each pilaster begins as a man or a woman,-arms cut off at the shoulders, breasts and shoulders looking from a distance grotesquely like four humps. Where the legs should begin, the trunk ends in a great gargoyle,-a lion's head, or a man's, or a bull's,-some grotesque, some beautiful; below this, a conventional tapering support. In the pointed arch of each of the lower windows, also a carved head, no two of them alike, many of them beautiful. It is a grand old building, and one might study it and draw from it by the week. Passing this and crossing an arm of the sea,-which, by the way, you are perpetually do

ollow cylinders. Between these is the way up, a winding stone road, smooth and broad; and if you'll believe it, in 1716 that rascal Catherine of Russia actually drove up to the top of it in a coach and four, Peter going ahead on horseback. I walked up two of the turns of this stone roadway, and it made me dizzy to think what a cla

up for the accommodation of poor students at the University. One hundred poor students still hav

d terraced roofs, and a great beak like a ship's prow projecting from the ridge-pole of the dormer window. From this the grain is lowered and hoisted to and from the ships below. The ships lie crowded in these narrow arms, as in a harbor, and make pictur

(about fifty cents) permits a family to take its children there every day; and I am sure there must have been two hundred children in sight as I walked up the dark dense shaded avenue of linden trees at the upper end of which sits the beloved Hans Christian, with the sunlight falling on his head. "The children come here every day," said the commissionnaire; "and that is the reason they put him here, so they can see him." He looked as if he also saw them. A more benignant, lifelike, tender look was never wrought in b

THE DANIS

his splendors of art and architecture, or than the whole Danish dynasty, with their p

l the Dutch dames were out and about in their best, driving in carts and walking, or sitting in their doorways. The women were "sights to behold." The poorer ones wore shirred sunbonnets on their heads, made of calico, coming out like an old poke-bonnet in front, and with full capes which set out at a fly-away angle behind. They seemed to have got the conception of the cape from the arms of their own windmills (of which, by the way, there are several on the island; and their revolving arms add to the island's expression of being insecurely at sea!). Next below the sunbonnet came a gay handkerchief crossed on the breast, over a black gown with tight sleeves; a full bright blue apron, reaching half-way round the waist and coming down to within two inches of the bottom of the overskirt, completed their rig. It was droller than it sounds. Some of them wore three-cornered handkerchiefs pinned outside their poke-bonnets, pinned under their chins, and the point falling over the neck behind. These were sometimes plain colors, sometimes white, embroidered or trimmed with lace. The men looked exactly like any countrymen in England or Scotland or America. If we haven't an international anything else, we have very nearly an international costume for the masculine human creature; and it is as ugly and un

stened down at the ridge-pole by long bits of crooked wood, one on each side, the two crossing and lapping at the ridge-pole and held together there by pins. The effect of a long, low roof set thick with these cross-pieces at the top is almost as if dozens of slender fishes were set there with forked tails up in the air; and when half a dozen sparrows are flitting and alighting on these p

a fine and serious face, of oval contour; therefore the ruff suited him. On short necks and below round faces it is simply grotesque, and no more dignified than a turkey-cock's ruffled feathers. He preached with great fervor and warmth of manner; but as I could not understand a word he said, I should have found the sermon long if I had not been very busy in studying the bonnets and faces, and choir of little girls in the gallery. More than half the congregation were in the ordinary modern dress, and would have passed unnoticed anywhere. All the men looked like well-to-do New England farmers, coloring and all; for the blue-eyed, fair-haired type prevails. But the women who had had the sense and sensibility to stick to their own national clothes were as pretty as pictures, as their faces showed above the dark olive-brown pews, framed in their front porches of bonnets,-for that is really what they ar

d for the first time that I and the commissionnaire had been all that time locked in. After church the sexton told us that there would be a baptismal service there in an hour,-eleven babies to be baptized. That was something not to be lost; so I drove away for half an hour, went to a farm-house and begged milk, and then, after I had got my inch, asked for my habitual ell,-that is, to see the house. The woman was, like all housekeepers, full of apologies, but showed me her five rooms with good-will,-five in a row, all opening together, the kitchen in the middle,

ds, and bureaus. There were prints on the wall, and a splendid brass coffee-pot and urn under pink mosquito

led the roll, apparently so as to make sure all was right. Then the minister came in, and went the round, saying something over each baby and making the sign of the cross on its head and breast. I thought he was through when he had once been round doing this; but no,-he had to begin back again at the first baby and sprinkle them. Oh, how the poor little things did scream! I think all eleven were crying by this time, and I couldn't stand it; so at the third baby I signed to my commissionnaire that we would go, and we slipped out as quietly as we could. "Will there be much more of the service?" I asked him. "Oh, yes," he said. "He will preach now to the fathers and to the godfathers and godmothers." I doubt if the godmothers knew one word he said. The babies all wore little round woollen hoods, most of them bright blue, with three white buttons in a row on the back. Their dresses were white, but short; and each baby had a long white apron on to make a show with in front. This was as long as a handsome infant's robe would be made anywhere; but it was undisguisedly an apron, open all the way behind, and in the case of these poor little screa

the museums if I come out of them alive; it sounds as if nobody could. One ought to be

n Norway, and my contempt for them was in direct proportion to my familiarity. I defied them by day, and ignored them by night. But the Danish flea is as David to Saul! He is a cross between a bedbug

. Bless