THE BIRD-BERGS OF LAPLAND. 37 



sky — and they are most truly characteristic of the scenery of the 

 interior. 



But, majestic as this beauty is, bewildering and overwhelming 

 as are the fjords with their precipitous walls, their ravines and 

 valleys, headlands and peaks, they are yet less characteristic than 

 the islands and skerries lying out in the sea, stretching from the 

 south of the country up to the far north, and forming a maze of 

 bays, sounds, and straits such as can hardly be seen elsewhere in 

 the wide world. 



The larger islands reproduce more or less faithfully the char- 

 acters of the mainland; the smaller ones and the skerries present, 

 under all circumstances, an aspect of their own. But, as one travels 

 towards the north, this aspect changes more or less with every degree 

 of latitude. Like the sea, the islands lack the richness of the south, 

 but are, nevertheless, by no means devoid of beauty. Especially in 

 the midnight hours, when the low midsummer sun stands large and 

 blood-red on the horizon, its veiled brilliance reflected alike from 

 the ice-covered mountain-tops and from the sea, they have an irre- 

 sistible charm. This is enhanced by the homesteads which are 

 dotted everywhere over the landscape — dwellings built of wood and 

 roofed with turf, glowing in a strange, blood-red colour which con- 

 trasts sharply with the green turf roof, the black darkness of the 

 adjacent mountain-side, and the ice-blue of the glaciers in the 

 background of the picture. 



The southerner remarks, with some surprise, that these home- 

 steads become larger, handsomer, and more roomy the farther north 

 he travels; that, though no longer surrounded by fields, but at the 

 most by small gardens, they far excel in size and equipment the 

 hut -like buildings of southern Scandinavia; and that the most 

 pretentious of all may be on comparatively small islands, where the 

 rocks are covered only with turf, and where not even a little 

 garden can be won from the inhospitable soil. 



The seeming riddle is solved when we remember that in Nor- 

 land and Finland it is not the land but the sea that is ploughed; 

 that there men do not sow and wield the scythe in summer, but 

 reap in midwinter without having sowed; that it is in the months 



