208 VISIT TO DENMARK [1799. 



Dec. 21. Beady at six ; pass the bridge where the 

 battle was fought, or rather was said to have been 

 fought. Mrs Wollstonecraft tells a lie upon the subject. 

 We heard from Mansback, how Armfelt, a cavalry 

 officer, was posted at the pass beyond the bridge, to 

 defend it, with about 700 Swedes. Mansback offered 

 a deserter of his own, who knew the country, his life, 

 if he would carry him by another road through the 

 hill, which he did ; and then he surrounded Armfelt, 

 and took him. For this Armfelt was broke. Mans- 

 back thinks this very harsh, and says he was not at 

 all to blame. As for the bridge, he said he could 

 have passed the river easily, half a mile above, in 

 twenty places.* 



Dec. 21. The bridge and pass are very romantic, 

 the rocks, trees, &c. ; indeed all the day the road went 

 through a great variety of the finest rock-scenery, 

 often through flat cultivated country, and sometimes 

 in sight of bays of the sea, all frozen, but chiefly among 

 vast masses of rock quite bare, rising abruptly, and 

 whole hills, perhaps 300 feet high of, not an inch but 

 these masses, some of them as flat as a wall, others 

 rough, and in general each is one undivided block rising 

 out of a plain, or the sea. We proceeded with little 

 refreshment. Once I tried the brandwein with water, 

 and found to my cost that what I had heard was true 



* A good English account will be found of this eventful period of 

 Swedish history in a Life of Armfelt by the late Thomas Watts of the 

 British Museum, in the fragment of a General Biographical Dictionary 

 issued by the Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge. 



