prosperity here that is so striking to the north. There are no looms at work in every room; nor the good dwellings and abundance of household goods. The soil and the people seem poorer. The country is studded with large rolled stones, but here the corners and edges are so sharp that they have clearly never been much rolled or exposed to friction. In the appearance of the houses here, there is something less pastoral than in Norway, where they stand generally upon the green sward, which reaches, unbroken but by the footpath, to the very doors and close round. Here the houses are huddled together; little dirty or dusty roads between, ragged fences around, and those lumps of rocks sticking up every where. The way of living among the country people is much the same as in Norway. Five meals a day are regularly taken even by those who are using bark meal. Fish, meat, cheese, milk, and gruel, that is, meal with milk or with meat soup (meal and water would be thought very poor gruel), are the articles of diet. Dried rein-deer meat, smoked salmon, mutton, and game, are the solid articles. Cheese and butter being saleable, are more sparingly used than on the other side of the Fjelde, where there are fewer markets. The mid-day sleep is as regularly taken by all ranks at this season as in Spain or Italy. I got to a house called Mallsta to-day, about 50 English miles, crossing the river Nyurunda upon a good wooden bridge of seven arches.

July 27.-Travelling here is certainly cheap and comfortable. You pay 16 skillings banco or

about 6 pence sterling per horse for the Swedish mile, which is about 7 English. The boy who accompanies you to take back the horse, for you are entitled to drive yourself, is as well pleased with 8 skillings banco, or 3 pence sterling, as an English post-boy with 3s. 6d. for the stage. It is very characteristic of the two nations in this peninsula, that

if

you pay the Norwegian boy a little more than he expects, he bawls out Tak! Tak! (thanks, thanks), like the clapping together of two deal boards; seizes your hand, and gives it a squeeze and hearty shake, which make your bones ache; the Swedish sighs out his Tak odmydegst (thanks most humbly), kisses the back of your hand, and retires, making his obeisances with a grace which many a country gentleman at Queen Victoria's court might envy. In Norway, if you give a penny to a child, or alms to a beggar, you can scarcely get off without a shake of the hand: the more polished Swede kisses your sleeve or the skirt of your coat. You always get clean sheets and nice bedding at the poorest inn in Sweden, and our road-side inns in Scotland, even in the south in many burgh towns, are not to be compared to the Swedish. At this season, strawberries and milk, eggs, fish, raw salmon, which you may get roasted for your own eating, are to be found every where, and excellent coffee; but the fare generally is scanty, and travellers who are particular, should bring a provision basket with them, well stocked. The gaestgifaregaard, which formidable word is expressed by our three letters-inn - has generally a separate build

ing for lodging the guests in, apart from the family house, and which, like a manse, is built by the parish. The innkeeper is a kind of public parish officer, having jurisdiction in disputes about post horses, turns of duty, and so on; and must keep regular lists of these, which are inspected and countersigned by the local functionaries once a month. He is also authorised to examine the passports of all travellers, and must enter them in his day-book. Sweden has all the trammels of the French system of passports upon the internal communications of the natives. The artisan and labouring man cannot move from one place to another without passports and waste of time. I travelled to-day about 50 miles, and stopped at a house called Mo Myskie. Although all this country, from the water edge up to the ridge of the Norwegian Fjelde, which is from 150 to 200 miles from the Baltic shores as the peninsula slopes upwards very gradually on this side is covered with one mass of forest, the trees are but stinted and of small growth on the coast, and for many miles up from it. Shelter and warm exposure in deep glens or valleys may make exceptions; but generally there is no wood fit for any thing but tar or charcoal on this road, which runs parallel to the coast, touching the heads of some of the deepest inlets, but generally 10 or 12 miles from the sea.

July 28. I travelled great part of this day on one of those singular ridges or mounds of sand and stones which I met with on the borders of Lapland. Here it is on a greater scale, running at least ten

P

miles from Strakarra, to Tradia, and cutting in two several small lakes. The road is carried upon the top of it, which may be from eight to fifteen feet above the level of the water or of the plain on each side, and to which it slopes steeply and equally down. It cannot be an ancient sea beach, because it slopes equally on both sides, and there must have been a water power on each side, one within, as well as one without, to give it both slopes. It is also of subsequent formation to many moderate heights of the ground rock, not much more elevated than itself, because it never crosses or covers these, but abuts against them. It is a formation also subsequent apparently to the present small lakes which it cuts into two, because the two parts belong generally to one basin of surrounding ground, and this is an anomalous unconnected feature of ground in their assiette. But it appears to be an older formation than that of the rolled, or erratic stones, for many of these rest upon it. This, and the sharp edges and corners of many of these erratic blocks, make it no improbable conjecture, that they have been transported on fields of ice, and deposited on their melting - an operation now going on hourly on the sea, in parallel or lower latitudes, on the American coast. It is observable, I think, of all these erratic masses of stone, that generally they rest upon the smallest base their surface presents. Many are almost rocking-stones, and have been taken for works of art or of giant power by the vulgar in all ages, the points of contact on which they rest being so small. Now if

they had been rolling or in motion, this would be contrary to mechanical law or experience, for the largest area of base would have presented the greatest resistance to the rolling power, and the mass would have rested upon its largest base. But this pear-like shape is compatible with the circumstance of being deposited in shallow water, and rubbed against by gravel in torrents or tides until the lower part of almost every mass is worn away.

July 29th.-The ash, the black poplar, and the plane, begin to relieve the landscape from the pointed outline of fir tops against the sky, although in all Swedish scenery the latter are the characteristic feature. Every country seems to have a scenery peculiar to itself; at least people distinctly recognise an Italian, a Dutch, a Highland, an English landscape. The characterising features in a Swedish would be, this long, jagged, sky line of fir tops, a little lake in the bottom enveloped in woods, and at one end a little lively green spot of cultivation, studded with grey masses of rocks and grey houses of about the same shape and size. The country being flat comparatively, its streams have not the same run or liveliness, nor its breaks the same abruptness as in our highlands, or in Wales, or Norway. Ruysdal's pictures would find fewer prototypes than Kuyp's in Sweden. The soft wooded scenery of these lakes, with the distant points and islands swimming between the air and water, remind you much of Kuyp's style of landscapes.

Gefle, August. This is the sixth town in population, standing next to Stockholm, Gotten