Now, fancy yourself--you, who have done as the Southerners do--arriving at a little village in an out-of-the-way place in Norway. Nobody flutters about your carriole to escort you to a hotel, but you enter the "station," a low, rambling wooden structure, with diffidence. You see the lady of the house and shake hands with her; you ask her to be good enough to let you stay there the night; you enter a bedroom, where everything is plain as a deal box, but clean as a Dutch tulip. Then you sit down with the family in the general room to your meal. It will assuredly consist of either trout and salmon, or salmon and trout, with perhaps an egg, perhaps potatoes, perhaps black bread. No Bass, but perhaps some Norsk Öl, a very pleasant beverage. After supper you will smoke a pipe with your landlord, who will probably invite you to see the pigs, or will lend you a hand to splice up any broken harness of your carriole.
About nine or ten o'clock you will go to bed, in the broad daylight if it be summer-time, and in the morning you will wake up, finding the landlady's daughter at your bedside, with a delicious cup of hot coffee and a natty little roll, or perchance a biscuit. And then, still early in the morning, you will bid farewell as to old friends, you will shake hands all round, and away in your carriole to drive through romantic scenery, and to feel as though Norway had been made specially for you.
Before you have been two days in the country you will love the quaint, unsophisticated people, so hearty in their kindness, so ungrudging in their hospitality, and their Old-World manners and customs, so genuine in an age of sham, so solid in an age of veneer. One great charm of Norway, then, is its people; another, and perhaps more to be appreciated by some, is its scenery.
"Is it like Switzerland?" No; Norway is only like Norway. It is not so grand as regards the height of its mountains, yet its grandeur is far more solemn. It has a dozen fjords more startling than the Lake of Lucerne; in a day's journey you will pass waterfalls and cascades which would make a fortune to "proprietors" in Switzerland, and are not so much as mentioned in the Norwegian guide-books. Switzerland is grand beyond compare, but it must be confessed it is a monotonous grandeur. Not so with Norway: its charms of scenery are varied as they are unique. A coast wild and rugged; mighty pine-forests, interminable; lakes beautiful as Windermere; fjords awful in their grandeur; valleys rich in their fertility; fjelds bare and barren; sport with the gun, sport with the rod; these and a hundred other charms may be entered in the catalogue.