The Charm of Scandinavia

You have brought this upon yourself, you know, for it was your proposition that Aylmer and I should try to make you feel the charm of Scandinavia as we have felt it. But do not suppose that we are going to enter upon a contest of wits in order to make our respective countries shine upon the written page, or that we are going to indulge in high-flown descriptions. We shall try to tell you of things as we see them; of the peasant in his low-thatched roof, who is as interesting as the king in his palace. We may not even think it beneath our dignity to tell you of the Smörgåsbörd, and of the different kinds of cheese of many colors which grace the breakfast table, for all these different, homely, commonplace things enter into the spell of Scandinavia. As you know, we started on this long northern journey at Berlin. This trip has been robbed of all its terrors, since keen competition has compelled the railway and steamboat companies to exchange the littleDampfschiff, little bigger than tugboats, which used to connect Germany with Scandinavia, for great ferry steamers, which take within their capacious maws whole railway trains, so that now we can go to sleep in Berlin, in a very comfortable sofwagn, and wake up the next morning on Swedish soil, with no consciousness of the fact that in the middle of the night we had a four hours’ voyage across a bit of blue sea which is often as stormy as the broad Atlantic itself. You remember that I wrote you about a former journey across this same bit of water during an equinoctial gale, how our boat was tossed about like a cork, how the port was stove in, and I was washed out of my bunk. Well, last night I was reminded of that former journey by contrast, for I never knew when we were trundled aboard ship at Sassnitz, or when we were trundled on to dry land again at Trelleborg. I was sorry to cross the island of Rügen in the night, for this bit of wind-swept, sea-washed land will always be associated for us with “Elizabeth” and her adventures, though to be sure her German garden was not on Rügen, but on the mainland near by. However, if I did not know when we passed from Germany to Sweden, it was very evident that we were in a different country when the window curtain was raised in the morning, and the porter informed me deferentially, in his musical Swedish voice, that “caffe and Smörbröd” would be served in the compartment if I wished. Everything is different here. This little four hours’ voyage in the middle of the night seems to have put a wide ocean between the experiences of to-day and yesterday. The brick houses are exchanged for wooden ones. The pine trees which abound in the sandy wastes north of Berlin have been exchanged for graceful white birches, sprinkled with spruce and fir. Instead of the gutturals of the south we hear the open, flowing vowels of the north. Even the signs with which the railway stations are so abundantly plastered that one has difficulty in finding their names, are different from those in Germany, and our attention is called to wholly different brands of beer, whisky, and margarine.