200 THROUGH NORWAY WITH THE VESEY CLUB. 
Sep., 1890. 
subsequent railway jolting, you pay for the whole 1 kr. 50.* 
This is not, perhaps, cheap, but the appetite of a Norwegian 
traveller is enormous. 
After taking an easterly course for an hour or so, the 
railway strikes the valley of the Glommen, turns sharply to 
the north, following the river, to which it clings pretty closely 
for the next hundred and fifty miles, and as in this distance 
the river falls approximately 1,500 feet, its rapids and 
cascades form an ever-changing item in the scene. The 
whole valley of the Glommen is densely wooded, almost 
entirely, as far as one could see, with Abies excelsa, the well- 
known Norway pine. The whole wealth of this district lies 
in its wood, which, felled in autumn and winter, is sent down 
the river in the spring floods of May and June. In our 
journey early this morning we passed, at Fredrickstad, 
by the side of mile after mile of huge timber stacks, for 
Fredrickstad lies bv the mouths of the Glommen, and the 
barkless trunks which are sent down the river are there 
collected, and claimed by their owners, whose private mark 
is placed upon the broader cut end. As we go along this and 
other timber streams of Norway we constantly come across 
trunks, stranded upon shoals, left behind by the diminishing 
floods, and waiting, dumb and patient signs of the industry 
of thousands, for the floods of another spring to carry 
them again on their downward way. How often do people 
resemble these trunks, hesitating while the flood of fortune 
is at its height, and at length, emboldened by the success of 
others, launching themselves on the waters, too late ; only to 
be left by the retiring floods amongst the flotsam and jetsam 
of commercial civilisation, in a place whence they are 
not worth the cost of endeavouring to rescue them,—but 
without “ next year's floods ” to look forward to. The tail of 
a flood is the happy hunting ground of the company promoter. 
At Lille-elvedal we leave the train, just before midnight, 
and spend the rest of the night in preparation for a hard 
day’s work on the morrow. 
The morrow came, and with it the rain. For twelve long 
hours we drove through a pitiless, ceaseless downpour, 
* A krone, coinage of the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, 
and Sweden, is Is. ljd. English money, and is divided into 100 oreu 
When the coinage was reorganised, in 1875, it is a pity that the Ger¬ 
man mark, or English shilling, was not adopted as a standard. The 
measures are a trifle perplexing ; e. g., while the kilometre is a stand¬ 
ard of length in all three countries, the “ foot ” measure is still used 
for measuring heights, at any rate in Norway and Sweden. The Nor¬ 
wegian is about Jin. shorter, and the Swedish Jin. longer, than the 
English foot. The mile of Norway is equal to seven English miles, 
that of Sweden about GOO yards shorter. 
