VANDAL'S TRAVELS IN SWEDEN AND NORWAY.* AN experienced reader is

justified in looking warily upon any fresh book of travels about Norway. The country seems to have been done and overdone, by men, by women, by unprotected females, by donkeys, two-legged and four-legged, with or without gipsies to match. Yet we can assure him that on taking up M. Vandal's broad-printed duodecimo he will find that he has some pleasant hours before him. In the first place, though M. Vandal speaks only on his title-page of Sweden and Norway, he takes up his reader in Lubeck, and only parts company with him in Denmark ; and Norway proper only occupies 150 pages of the book, out of 392. But above all, M. Vandal has the gift of knowing what not to say, so that whilst to do justice to an ordinary book of travels one should reckon up the read- able pages, it is only the dozen or twenty comparatively dull ones that one could feel tempted to count in dealing with this volume. When will our English travellers learn that except where the region is an absolutely unknown one, a book of travels ought never to be a road-book ? that M passing through countries which the reader must know about if he has not seen them, their first, second, and third duty is to leave out whatever he may be fairly presumed to know already, or only to deal with it in reference to their own impressions ? A good book of travels in a civilised country must be a work of art, or it is worth nothing. If it is a work of art, however well known the country, it may be as fresh and as interesting to us as a picture of a well-known scene by some true master of the brush.

Now, if we analyse M. Vandal's book, we shall find that it con- sista of a series of landscapes and genre pictures, strung together by an itinerary so lightly indicated that we are never bored by it. The opening chapter, on Lubeck and her middle-age fashions- " no dead body, whose shroud one comes to admire, but an oddity who chooses to dress now as she did five hundred years ago "- forms, as it were, a quaint Gothic archway, framing all the land- scapes beyond. Can anything be better than this picture of Southern Sweden, which begins the series ?—

" At a fow miles' distance from the coast the forests begin, to keep us company as far as Stockholm ; the vegetation of the North reveals itself to us in its austere charms. There oaks and beeches no longer exercise, as in our woods, an uncontested sovereignty ; they appear henceforth but rarely, timidly as it were ; the fir has dethroned them. This king of Northern forests there shows itself in his full vigour ; the stray firs of our forests only recall its likeness from afar. The Northern tree flings with one stroke towards the sky, to a prodigious height, its bare trunk, solid and lithe ; its head is crowned with a plume of dark green foliage, which the sun pierces with a thousand arrows of gold. Against the russet fir-trunks stands out the paleness of a few scattered birches, like the white threads in silvering hair. The openings in these forests are lakes ; we follow during long hours their wooded banks, whose meandorings disappear and lose themselves in the far dis- tance ; we travel often on narrow causeways thrown between two lakes. Is it land or water that predominates in this landscape? Are we crossing an isle-strewn sea, or a flooded valley, in the midst of which emerge a few chains of hills? We could not say. Do not ask of these shoots of water the poetic outlines of tho lakes of Lombardy, do not seek in them for the reflexion of the Jungf ran or the Rigi, do not think of the black lochs of Scotland spoken of by Byron. The lakes of the North, framed in forests that bathe in them their sombre fringes, sown with green islets, borrow from the sky which they reflect a cold, metallic brilliancy, or a bluish transparency, like those of the crevasses which gape on the glacier-aide. The spectacle pleases at first by its novelty ; then the re- petition of the same effect creates monotony,—it should provoke weari- ness, and yet the eye remains fixed on these uniform aspects, for a mysterious attraction breathes from those silent waters, that austere vegetation, those sombre tints, those softly undulating outlines. In south Sweden, the nature of the North does not yet reveal itself under its imposing aspects, but it is already attractive, captivating ; its charm precedes its beauty, it makes itself loved before making itself admired."

The descriptions of Stockholm and Upsal are equally good in their way. The travellers (for M. Vandal seems to have had a com- panion) had the good-luck to reach Upsal on the occasion of the yearly fraternisation of the students of the five Northern Universi- ties,—Copenhagen, Christiania, Lund, Delsingfors, and Upsal,— those of IIelsingfors having only in the year of their visit (1875) been allowed by the Russian Government to join in the celebration. The visitors were received with the utmost cordiality, and were specially recommended to push as far as Leeksand, in Dalecarlia, so as to be there on a Sunday. They took the advice, and we owe to it one of the most perfect pictures in the book, that which describes the appearance on the hitherto solitary waters of Lake Silljan of swarms of huge boats, long and slim, painted red, blue, or yellow, rowed by girls in long, white petticoats, trimmed with red, each boat being the ancestral property of a particular gaard, or farmstead, and all hastening to Lecksa,nd church, with a freight of peasants in antique costumes. Each parish and family

• En Karrtole 4 travera la Suede et la NarteiVe. Par Albert Vandal. Paris: E. Plon et Ole. 1870,

has its favourite colours, and each its history. On disembarking, the rower-girls immediately throw off their white costumes, and, each, in a moment, having opened a small bundle she bore with her, puts on a new dress, as parti-coloured as that of the other

peasant women. All walk up gravely towards the church, with illuminated prayer-books under their arms, the children singing- hymns before them ; the clergyman in his robes awaits them on,

the threshold of the church, which has become too small for it worshippers. In winter they attend church in like manner, but come in sledges.

The next chapter relates a journey from Stockholm to Hapa- randa by steamer, and from thence to Mount Avasaxa, in Lap- land, for the sight of the " midnight sun " on June 24

"If the Lapps deserve the palm of ugliness amongst all the ants of old Europe, their country is assuredly the most frightful of our continent. Horror is its special characteristic ; stony plains succeed dried-up marshes, the soil only shows at long intervals, covered with a blackish moss. Yet we are crossing forests, but the firs composing them do not pass throe feet in height The zone of dwarf trees succeeds that of gigantic firs, like Lapps beside Scandinavians.. Now and then, a strip of cultivated land brings rest to the eye ; wheat, ripen in forty days, and beneath an unsotting sun acquire a range and rapid development. In the north, corn-stalks are often taller than trees. Sometimes a few lowly flowers tinge the hill-sides with their sickly greenery, scarcely tall as grass which has just begun to grow. But those fugitive appearances

do not last,—the desert begins again. Tumble-down cabins, in which the cattle are shut up in winter, occur here and there on the plains, and only add through their ruinous appearance to the gloomy desolatoness of the landscape. The country, nevertheless, is not with- out inhabitants ; there are neither towns nor villages, but miserable buildings, scattered along the river-side [the Tornea-elf I appear at short intervals. Perched on blocks of stone, which in, winter defend them against the assaults of the snow, they look rather like huts affording shelter to a nomad population than permanent shelters for the protec- tion of families under a climate the most rigorous in the world. Broad skates stand up against the walls ; their purpose is to bear the eledges which were used yesterday and will be used again to-morrow. On the threshold half-naked children gaze at us as we pass ; their yellow hair throws like a golden nimbus round their heads. Sometimes talk men smoke their pipe gravely before their door, all wearing red-flannet shirts, scarlet caps, and a kind of sleeveless vest in coarse woollen stuff,. black or green. Under a sky without light, in a colourless country, the Finns have a passion for those bright tints and high tones of colour which nature denies them. The women wear gowns striped blue an red, and parti-coloured bodices."

The night of June 24 is celebrated in northern Sweden by a festival which has perpetuated itself from pagan times. in Finland it is preceded by a universal open-air bath, taken by persons of both sexes and all ages, in paradisaio costume. The

day of the 24th is chosen by young folks for their betrothal on Mount Avasaxa. On the first rising of the sun, a hymn is sung by women. As soon as its full disk appears, there is an explosion of joy ; choruses are sung, long strings of dancers stream along the sides of the rounded plateau of the mountain, and bonfire mix their pale fires with the sun's rays. On their return, the travellers cross from Sundsvall into Norway, and it is only at the further terminus of the railway- line from Sundsvall to Torpshammer that the real travels by Karriole begin, which give its title to the book. M. Vandal points out the remarkable fact that Sweden is now colonising her own territory, whole swarms of workers from the southern pro- vinces finding an occupation in cutting down the forests of the North and cultivating the cleared soil. At Friisen the travellers had the good-luck to stumble on a military camp, that of the singular territorial militia termed the lndella, in which all the

officers receive their pay in the usufruct of inalienable lands called " bastells," whilst the privates, according to a system re- sembling that which prevailed amongst ourselves in the middle- ages, are supplied by the landowners, each peasant being bound to find a man for the State, to equip and provide for him. The- men are under arms during about four weeks every year, and are

said to be very punctual in their attendance, as well as docile and obedient.

The contrast between Swedish and Norwegian landscape is well indicated. At the extremity of a dark gorge, the travellers find themselves looking over-

" A. chaos of sharp peak8, serrated mountain groats, summits piled on one another like the waves of a suddenly frozen sea. But through, the gaps in this foreground, as through a fringe of cyclopean battle- ments, appears in the distance a sheet of azure, a lake, in tone trans- parent and ideally tender; the opposite bank vanishes in a milky mist.. That tranquil, vaporous horizon softens the savage grandeur of the picture,—that lake, with its calm waters, is a gulf, or rather a fiord,. and the waters we see are those of the Northern ocean,"

Our French traveller finds that the first language heard in Norway is English, and that England is making of Norway an appendage to Scotland. Ile pokes fun, not ill-humourodly, at our guide-book worship, and the ill-luck of a tourist who, in pre-

sence of a cataract tumbling between two rocks into a bottomless gulf, could only exclaim, "How pretty !"—having -turned over the wrong page in his guide-book ! M. Vandal's Norwegian travels include Trondjem, the Dovre-Fjeld, a visit to the Tofte family, descendants of Harald Fair-hair, now dying out through sheer pride of ancestry ; the Rornsdal, Vöblungsneaa, Bergen, the Sognefiord, and its branch, the dark and narrow Norofiord (admirably described) ; thence by the Norodal and Vossevangen to the Hardangerfiord. From Odde, the Norwegian Interlaken, he proceeded on pony-back through Thelemarken to Kongsberg, and by rail to Christiania, crossing again into Sweden, from Frederichshald to Gothenburg, and from Gothenburg to Copenhagen. Of Thelemarken he declares that it remains un- discovered by the English (perhaps as being nearer to England), and has thus retained more primitive manners than any other part of Norway.

One of the oddest things in the book is the turning-up of Louis Philippe—of all men in the world—as a legendary personage in the far North. Travelling in Lapland in the month of March—so the tale goes—he was surprised by a snow-storm and on the brink of death, when a wretched-looking Lapp made his appearence and beckoned him to follow. The prince's servants believe that an evil spirit is appearing to them, but the duke commands them to follow him, and at the entrance of a cave he is amazed at hearing himself addressed by name in the purest French, and invited to tome in. A lovely young girl tells him that his arrival has been predicted by the old Lapp, her father, to whom the future is no secret. The old man in turn comes foward, and soon, seized with a prophetic madness, he foretells to the traveller the storms which have yet to burst over France ; that he will himself eventually receive the crown, but that a popular tempest like that which gave him the throne will hurl him from it. The girl proves by f30010 letters to her mother which have been preserved to be his .own sister. This strange tale seems to be quite current in the North, and forms the subject of a popular poem by Topelius, published in 1845.

An invariable depreciation of the Germans, and a somewhat (rampant Romanism, are the only offensive features in an other- wise singularly agreeable book. It is provided with some rather coarsely executed, but not ineffective illustrations; the frontispiece,

may be observed, representing a karriole driven at a speed which in Norway would be finable.