MAN AND WOMAN RANTOKEINS.

AMERICANS cannot but be interested in all that relates to Norway and the Norwegians. The old Norsemen who visited our shores some five centuries before Columbus discovered the New World, have transmitted to their descendants many of the sterling qualities that made them once pre-eminent in Northern Europe, and the curious student who pores over the scanty records of their voyages to North America, should visit the land of their descendants, who are still a hardy race, and who have to a surprising degree adhered to their language and habits, their dress and architecture, naval as well as ecclesiastical. Moreover, Norway, if we are correctly informed, sends annually ten thousand of her sons and daughters to our shores, and they form, with the Swedes, the most valuable class of immigrants, learning our language with remarkable facility, and conforming to our ways and customs the more readily since they are closely allied to us by their mental traits.

The poorer class of Norwegians, with their blood relatives and neighbors, the Swedes, on the whole form the finest class of peasantry in Europe. Indeed, we were constantly reminded of New Englanders and the inhabitants of our northernmost States, in noticing the faces and idiosyncrasies of Norwegians. The common people rule absolutely in Norway as in America. They

have never, strictly speaking, been under feudal laws, and have none of the servility and obsequiousness of the peasantry of England, Ireland, and Germany. Still independent, bold, and careful of their political rights, which each man holds as if a sacred trust handed down from his Viking ancestors, they excel in beauty of person, stature, and a certain freedom and nobility of carriage, those of a similar station in life elsewhere in Europe, not even perhaps excepting the Swiss. In these respects, they constantly remind the American traveler of the poorer class of farmers in New England and the North-western States. Add to this their strict economy, their proneness to strong drinks, in which during the fishing seasons they indulge far more than the people of Southern Europe, a taste undoubtedly fostered by the rigors and sudden changes of a cold climate; their devotion to chewing tobacco, almost a national trait; their native wit and mixture of simplicity and a certain quality of shrewdness, and one detects many

fully like the flatter portions of New Eng- | land, that we experienced a delicious home feeling. Here were groves of the ever-murmuring pine, with scattered clumps of the familiar birch, though exceeding ours in the beauty of its tracery of drooping branches. and leafy sprays; with lakes blossoming with pond lilies identical with ours, and embosomed among swelling hills and rolling prairie-like fields, repeating exactly the scenic features of New England. The illusion was carried out by the faces of the people, portraits of those we had left at home; many a face might here have found its counterpart in any Eastern city or country town of America. Nature is constantly repeating herself over the world, but she evinces a rare economy in the Northern hemisphere, where representative species, races even, among plants and animals, stock countries of opposing continents, which are themselves organic equivalents, their geological history being parallel chapters in the history of the world.

In going from Stockholm across the country and entering South-eastern Norway, with its rugged hills and trough-like valleys, its tarns and lakes, and tumbling streams, bubbling brooks and roaring torrents, with smiling farms surrounding the familiar red farmhouse, and here and there a sandy barren waste, the more hilly parts of New York and New England seemed reproduced.

On

the other hand, along the southern coast, especially in the Christiania fjord, the multitude of islands, the rocks and skerries, either crowned with birches and firs, or bare and naked, recalled vividly the deep bays indenting the shores of Maine; though, in justice to the latter, we -

must say that no scene about Christiania, lovely as it

NORWEGIAN FISHERMAN.

is, approaches the wondrous beauty of Casco Bay, perhaps the finest indentation on the eastern coast of North America. The vegetation is much more scanty and far less varied

than in Maine, while the beautiful coves and shaded harbors of the Maine fjords, or bays, have a fascinating beauty peculiar to themselves. The similarity of the northern

coast of Norway to that of Labrador is also most striking, though here, on the other hand, the difference is much in favor of the Norwegian scenery, the fjords being much deeper and longer,

and the mountains casting their reflections into the waters from a far greater height; while the coast of Labrador is in a degree monotonous. The feelings of interest and awe inspired by the scenery at the head of the Sogne fjord equaled those awakNORWEGIAN BRIDE IN COSTUME. ened by the finest Alpine scenery. Then again, the summer months witness the arrival on the northern coast of Norway of fleets of fishermen, as in Labrador. Moreover, their winters, long and dark, with deep snows, severe cold, and the long spring-time, are very similar to those of our Northern coast.

National characteristics depend to a certain extent on the nature of the soil and climate, and, though naturalists may be too prone to ascribe national traits to physical surroundings, and leave comparatively nothing to religious and moral agencies, every one rightly traces the hardy and adventurous spirit of northern peoples to their rugged soil and bracing climate. The Vikings and their subjects owed much of their bodily activity and success in arms to the influences of their northern climate. They were indeed a hardy, but also a rude race. With all their love of song and rude acquirements in art they were out and out heathen, with the vices of heathendom, and the dark superstitions of a brutal age. We should remember that if they were semi-barbarians, many lights relieved the shades. We are told by modern Norwegian historians that the chapters in the lives of the old North Sea rangers, notably Harald Haarfager, the Fairhaired, and others less known to fame, rough, ruthless freebooters that they were.

yet glow with records of deeds of kindness to foe as well as friend, and that the virtues of charity and forgiveness were not unknown among them. A heathen is a heathen, but a Goth is a man for all that. Though these Gothic races, upon whom the Romans looked down with ill-disguised contempt, were rude pagans, yet they possessed the latent qualities that under favoring circumstances of soil and climate, and the moral régime of Christianity, blossomed out into the finer qualities that mark the present

FISHERMAN'S WIFE (SHOWING HEAD-DRESS).

Scandinavian races. Their history repeats that of the English and Germans, as they arose from the common Gothic stock, originating from an unknown race, which, after flowing over in waves of migration from Asia into Eastern and Middle Europe, sent an advance guard, the ancestors of the Norwegians, into Scandinavia, by way of Denmark. If these people were semi-savage they yet carried in their souls those latent germs destined under a favoring Heaven to bud forth into a higher and richer life, and a more complete civilization than that same Roman people who once despised them.

It is interesting to trace certain traits and customs in vogue among the conservative Norwegians of this day, back to the old Norse ways. These bits of Norse manners are like the fossil shells and leaves and waifs left by the wreck of ages in past geological times, with which we repeople the worlds of the past. The manners of the people, high-born and peasant, are simple; one is struck by this after passing through Southern Europe and Germany. Undoubtedly, next to the originally independent

spirit of the people, this simplicity has been fostered by the abolition of a hereditary nobility. Since 1814, all titles have been abolished. Indeed, Norway is a nation of farmers and fishermen, with a few men of comparative wealth and distinction, who claim to be descendants of the Sea-kings and chiefs. They reside in the larger towns, as one sees no country-seats in passing over the inland roads. The manners even of the wealthy and cultivated class of Bergen are peculiarly simple, nearly as much so in some respects as among the rural population of the older of the United States.

While steaming down the Sogne fjord our vessel would occasionally touch at the fishing hamlets clinging to the mountain-sides, and sometimes looking as if ready to drop into the dark deep waters beneath. Boatloads of villagers came off and surrounded our steamer, and almost invariably the girls and young women, with bright, comely faces, crowded some of the boats (with one or two boys to row them), while others would be filled with boys and young men. On the shore stood groups of matrons with their babies in their arms, watching the weekly or fortnightly visitor, and rows of maidens. standing hand in hand gazed at our craft, while the young men, and boys stood apart by themselves. There seemed to be little of that intimacy between the young people of both sexes which is so common with us; while, on the other hand, there was none of the precocity of superannuated boyhood, and of coquetry in the girls, that is too apparent among American youth. Naturally enough, when the sexes do come together, the courtship is brief. Love at first sight, followed by a speedy wedding, results in happy unions, that remain so throughout life. Wedded happiness, we were told on good authority, is the rule and not the exception. Once married, the husband and wife always remain ardent lovers.

They are fond of dinner and evening parties; the company assemble at five o'clock, not breaking up until early in the morning; of these twelve hours many are devoted to the pleasures of the table, while the later moments are spent in dancing, acting charades, and playing games; or stories are improvised and poems rehearsed, which draw out the natural quick wit and humor of the Norwegian. Singularly enough, in Bergen, at least, if not in other cities, the ladies, when dancing is not going on, sit by themselves, sometimes even in a separate room, while