196 TRAVELS IN THE EIGHTIES. 



and with a cloudless sky overhead, lighting up the 

 brilliant colours of the rocks, overgrown, where they 

 formed but an islet, with lichens, and scraped, flattened, 

 and planed down by prehistoric ice, but covered, 

 whenever their dimensions were worthy of being 

 called those of an island, with an abundant supply 

 of small timber and shrubs. Tall cairns of stones, 

 painted white to make them conspicuous, marked out 

 the course, varied in the case of shallows and of 

 sunken rocks by what reminded one of brooms. Here 

 and there was seen some fishing hamlet with its natural 

 harbour, while now and again one felt the ocean swell 

 through some opening in the barrier of reefs and 

 islands, as the effect of the late gale. After calling 

 at the Eussian customs post upon an outlying cluster, 

 where seals are placed upon the hatches, and passing 

 within sight of Hango, situated upon a long promon- 

 tory, we arrived at Helsiogfors in the evening, which 

 is the capital of Finland, with numbers of exceedingly 

 fine buildings, including a Parliament house, uni- 

 versity, cathedral, and several theatres and churches, 

 with very extensive fortifications. 



His Excellency the Danish Minister to Eussia, who 

 was on board, disembarked to go on by rail to Peters- 

 burg, reminding me at parting that if the salmon re- 

 fused the artificial fly in the rivers which flow into the 

 Gulf of Bothnia, they were sometimes taken with it in 

 the Yuoksa Eiver, which enters Lake Ladoga at Kex- 

 holm, not far from St. Petersburg, and on which some 

 iish residents in the capital have formed a fishing 



