21 



Here it is wood, wood, wood, or perhaps I should say timber, 

 timber, timber and wood everywhere. Wood by the roadside, trucks 

 laden with wood, wood piled at the stations and on the fields, and 

 last of all a river covered with wood and floating timber. 



This is the Glommen, here a broad river, and apparently deep ; near 

 the railway bridge by which it is crossed, the logs have been collected 

 into floating islands of wood, begirt and confined by a chain, of which 

 the links are logs, logs with a hole bored at either end, and tied one 

 to another by withes. As we proceed we see the river bearing hundreds 

 and thousands of logs onward to this gathering-place. The size of the 

 river compared with the size of these suggests the idea of some boys 

 having emptied into a brook a hundred, or a thousand, or a hundred 

 thousand boxes of matches, and we looking on seeing them floating away. 

 Again and again we came upon a little fall, one of three or four feet, 

 and there they came tumbling down sometimes sideways, some- 

 times slanting, sometimes head foremost, kicking up their heels in the 

 air. 



The river is broad, it comes curving along through woodlands, these 

 partly concealed, and I felt as if I could realize the graphic picture 

 given by Hugh Miller of a river in pre-Adamic times bringing down 

 the forestal products which afterwards were converted into fields of 

 coal. 



The Glommen is the principal river in Norway. It originates in the 

 lake Oresund, under the 62 of north latitude, and runs southward about 

 90 miles through a rugged channel full of cataracts and shoals. One of 

 its confluents is the Worm, which flows through Lake Mios. Before 

 their confluence it is as large as the Thames at Putney, and about 

 20 miles below this it flows into the sea at JFrederickstadt. Its highest 

 cataract is that of Sarpen, which is 60 feet perpendicularly, and is not 

 far from its influx into the sea. 



In travelling thus far one meets chiefly with a stalwart race of 

 yeomen, presenting very much the same general appearance as do 

 Americans in rural districts in the United States, or as do sub- 

 stantial Dutch boors in the inland districts of the colony of the Cape 

 of Good Hope. But in Christiania there is a museum of Scandinavian 

 curiosities, amongst which are life-size figures of Norwegian peasants 

 in picturesque national costumes, which I had previously seen do good 

 service at one of the International Exhibitions, either that at Paris in 

 1867, or that at Vienna in 1873 and which have been secured for 

 permanent exhibition here. I may mention in passing that I was 

 struck with the resemblance of many of the Norwegians of all classes, 

 both men and women, to personal friends of my own in Scotland. . I 

 have named a dozen, and might have named a score of friends whose 



