810 Rev. U. F. Borgesen’s Description of V elite's Giel , 
I spent the night at Vettie, and was next morning out with the 
good man to have a full view of his little romantic dale, where 
hill, and valley, wood and water, the lofty black mountain- 
masses, over which the majestic fall poured its foaming silver, 
were all grouped in the most picturesque manner, in a landscape 
in which the strongest features of Nature were wonderfully 
blended with her sweetest smiles. The severe and the gay mo- 
derated one another by being mingled in one look. The cho- 
rus of the feathered tribe only was wanting in wood and forest. 
The temperature here is too severe for the delicate songsters of 
the sky ; now 7 here does the lark mount in his airy flight ; even the 
thrush flies to milder regions. The cuckoo only, with his mono- 
tonous song, for a short time enjivens the silence of the wood. 
I had learned from the goodwife how they carry their chil- 
dren from this place to church. I was curious to learn of 
her husband, how they got the dead carried from it to the 
church-yard. It is impossible that two people could go beside 
one another in the Giel ; and I could not conceive that a coffin 
could be placed on horse-back. He gave me the following ac- 
count. The dead body, wrapped in linen, is laid on a plank, in 
which are bored holes at both ends, to which are fastened han- 
dles of cord. To this plank the body is lashed, and is thus car- 
ried by two men, one before and another behind, through the 
Giel, till they come to the farm-house of Selde, where it is laid 
in a coffin, and carried in the common way to the church-yard. 
If any one die in winter, at a time when the bottom of the Giel 
is not passable, or in the spring or harvest, they endeavour to 
preserve the body in a frozen state, which is seldom difficult, till 
it can be carried off in the manner I have just mentioned. Still 
more singular was the method which the goodman told me was 
employed several years ago, to convey a dead body to the grave, 
from a houseman’s place in Vormelien. J This place lies in Utle- 
dale, which borders with the fields of Vettie. It has a most 
frightful situation, deep in the Giel, by the side of the river ; 
and like Vettie, has no other road but a small steep path, on the 
side of the most dreadful precipices. As the inhabitants of this 
place had been often changed, there had been no deaths here. 
It happened, at last, for the first time, that a young man of 
seventeen years of age died. It never occurred to them to 
