the presence of the king, who tried him with various tests: among
others, he hid a diamond ring, and commanded Nixon to find it; but all
the answer he got from the cunning varlet was, "He that hideth can
find." The king caused all he said to be carefully noted and put down
in writing; gave him the run of the palace, and commanded that no one
should molest or offend him in any way.
One day, when the king was setting off on a hunt, Nixon ran to him,
crying and begging to be allowed to go too; saying that his time had
come now, and he would be starved if he were left behind. To humor his
whim and ease his fears, the king gave him into the especial charge
and keeping of one of the chief officers of the court. The officer, in
turn, to make sure that no ill befell the poor fellow, locked him up
in one of his private rooms, and with his own hands carried food to
him. But after a day or two, a very urgent message from the king
calling this officer suddenly away, in the haste of his departure he
forgot Nixon, and left him locked up in the apartment. No one missed
him or discovered him; and when at the end of three days the officer
returned, Nixon was found dead,--dead, as he had himself foretold, of
starvation. It is a strange and pitiful story, a tale suited to its
century, and could not be left out were there ever to be written a
ballad-history of the Vale-Royale's olden days.
It is a question, in early mornings in Chester, whether to take a turn
on the ancient walls, listening to echoes such as these from all the
fair country in sight in embrace of the Dee, or to saunter through the
market, and hear the shriller but no less characteristic voice of
Cestrian life to-day.
Markets are always good vantage-grounds for studying the life and
people of a place or region. The true traveller never feels completely
at home in a town till he has been in the markets. Many times I have
gathered from the chance speech of an ignorant market man or woman
information I had been in search of for days. Markets are especially
interesting in places where caste and class lines are strongly drawn,
as in England. The market man or woman whose ancestors have been of
the same following, and who has no higher ambition in life than to
continue, and if possible enhance, the good will and the good name of
the business, is good authority to consult on all matters within his
range. There is a self-poise about him, the result of his satisfaction
with his own position, which is dignified and pleasing.
On my last morning in Chester, I spent an hour or two in the markets,
and encountered two good specimens of this class. One was a fair,
slender girl, so unexceptionably dressed in a plain, well-cut ulster
that, as I observed her in the crowd of market-women, I supposed she
was a young housekeeper, out for her early marketing; but presently,
to my great astonishment, I saw her with her own hands measuring
onions into a huckster-woman's basket. On drawing nearer, I discovered
that she was the proprietress of a natty vegetable cart, piled full of
all sorts of green stuff, which she was selling to the sellers. She
could not have been more than eighteen. Her manner and speech were
prompt, decisive, business-like; she wasted no words in her
transactions. Her little brother held the sturdy pony's reins, and she
stood by the side of the cart, ready to take orders. She said that she
lived ten miles out of town; that she and her three brothers had a
large market garden, of which they did all the work with their own
hands, and she and this lad brought the produce to market daily.
"I make more sellin' 'olesale than sellin' standin'," she said; "an'
I'm 'ome again by ten o'clock, to be at the work."
I observed that all who bought from her addressed her as "miss," and
bore themselves toward her with a certain respectfulness of demeanor,
showing that they considered her avocation a grade or so above their
own.
A matronly woman, with pink cheeks and bright hazel eyes, had walked
in from her farm, a distance of six miles, because the load of greens,
eggs, poultry, and flowers was all that her small pony could draw.
Beautiful moss roses she had, at "thrippence" a bunch.
"No, no, Ada, not any more," she said, in a delicious low voice, to a
child by her side, who was slyly taking a rose from one of the
baskets. "You've enough there. It hurts them to lie in the 'ot
sun.--My daughter, mem," she explained, as the little thing shrunk
back, covered with confusion, and pretended to be very busy arranging
the flowers on a little board laid across two stones, behind which she
was squatted,--"my daughter, mem. All the profits of the flowers they
sell are their own, mem. They puts it all in the missionary box.
They'd eighteen an' six last year, mem, in all, besides what they put
in the school box. Yes, mem, indeed they had."
It struck me that this devout mother took a strange view of the
meaning of the word "own," and I did not spend so much money on Ada's
flowers as I would have done if I had thought Ada would have the
spending of it herself, in her own childish way. But I bought a big
bunch of red and white daisies, and another of columbines, white
pinks, ivy, and poppies; and the little maid, barely ten years old,
took my silver, made change, and gave me the flowers with a winsome
smile and a genuine market-woman's "Thank you, mem."
It was a pretty scene: the open space in front of the market building,
filled with baskets, bags, barrows, piles of fresh green things,
chiefly of those endless cabbage species, which England so proudly
enumerates when called upon to mention her vegetables; the dealers
were principally women, with fresh, fair faces, rosy cheeks, and soft
voices; in the outer circle, scores of tiny donkey-carts, in which the
vegetables had been brought. One chubby little girl, surely not more
than seven, was beginning her market-woman's training by minding the
donkey, while her mother attended to trade. As she stood by the
donkey's side, her head barely reached to his ears; but he entered
very cleverly into the spirit of the farce of being kept in place by
such a mite, and to that end employed her busily in feeding him with
handfuls of grass. If she stopped, he poked his nose into her neck and
rummaged under her chin, till she began again. All had flowers to
sell, if it were only a single bunch, or plant in a pot; and there
were in the building several fine stalls entirely filled with
flowers,--roses, carnations, geraniums, and wonderful pansies.
Noticing, in one stall, a blossom I had never before seen, I asked the
old woman who kept the stand to tell me its name. She clapped her hand
to her head tragically. "'Deed, mem, it's strange. Ye're the second
has asked me the name o' that flower; an' it's gone out o' my head. If
the young lady that has the next stand was here, she'd tell ye. It was
from her I got the roots: she's a great botanist, mem, an' a fine
gardener. Could I send ye the name o' 't, mem? I'd be pleased to
accommodate ye, an' may be ye'd like a root or two o' 't. It's a free
grower. We've 'ad a death in the house, mem,--my little grandchild,
only a few hours ill,--an' it seems like it 'ad confused the 'ole
'ouse. We've not 'ad 'eart to take pains with the flowers yet."
The old woman's artless, garrulous words smote like a sudden bell-note
echo from a far past,--an echo that never ceases for hearts that have
once known how bell-notes sound when bells toll for beloved dead! The
thoughts her words woke seemed to span Chester's centuries more
vividly than all the old chronicle traditions and legends, than
sculptured Roman altar, or coin, or graven story in stone. The strange
changes they recorded were but things of the surface, conditions of
the hour. Through and past them all, life remained the same. Grief and
joy do not alter shape or sort. Love and love's losses and hurts are
the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] Longfellow.
III.
NORWAY, DENMARK, AND GERMANY.
III.
NORWAY, DENMARK, AND GERMANY.
BERGEN DAYS.
The hardest way to go to Norway is by way of the North Sea. It is two
days' and two nights' sail from Hull to Bergen; and two days and two
nights on the North Sea are nearly as bad as two days and two nights
on the English Channel would be. But the hardest way is the best way,
in this as in so many other things. No possible approach to Norway
from the Continent can give one the sudden characteristic impression
of Norway sea and shore which he gets as he sails up the Stavanger
Fjord, and sees the town of Stavanger looking off from its hillside
over the fleets of island and rock that lie moored in its harbor.
At first sight it seems as if there were no Norway coast at all, only
an endless series of islands beyond islands, never stayed by any
barrier of mainland; or as if the mainland itself must be being
disintegrated from its very centre outwards, breaking up and crumbling
into pieces. Surely, the waters, when they were commanded to stay from
off the earth, yielded the command but a fragmentary obedience so far
as this region was concerned.
The tradition of the creation of Norway seems a natural outgrowth of
the place,--the only way, in fact, of accounting for the lay of the
land. The legend declares that Norway was made last, and in this wise:
On the seventh day, while God was resting from his labors, the devil,
full of spite at seeing so fair a world, hurled into the ocean a
gigantic rock,--a rock so large that it threatened to break the axis
of the universe. But the Lord seized it, and fixed it firm in place,
with its myriad jutting points just above the waters. Between these
points he scattered all the earth he had left; nothing like enough to
cover the rock, or to make a respectable continent,--only just enough
to redeem spots here and there, and give man a foothold on it. The
fact that forty per cent of the whole surface of Norway is over three
thousand feet above the sea is certainly a corroboration of this
legend.
This island fringe gives to the coast of Norway an indefinable
charm,--the charm of endless maze, vista, expectation, and surprise;
lure, also, suggestion, dim hint, and reticent revelation, like a
character one cannot fathom, and behavior one can never reckon on.
Though the ship sail in and out of the labyrinths never so safely and
quickly, fancy is always busy at deep-sea soundings; bewildered by the
myriad shapes, and half conscious of a sort of rhythm in their swift,
perpetual change, as if they, and not the ship, were gliding. The
vivid verdure on them in spots has more the expression of something
momentarily donned and worn than of a growth. It seems accidental and
decorative, flung on suddenly; then, again, soft, thick,
inexhaustible, as if the islands might be the tops of drowned forests.
Stavanger is one of the most ancient towns in Norway. It looks as if
it were one of the most ancient in the world; its very brightness,
with its faded red houses, open windows, and rugged pavements, being
like the color and smile one sees sometimes on a cheerful, wrinkled,
old face. The houses are packed close together, going up-hill as hard
as they can; roofs red tiled; gable ends red tiled also, which gives a
droll eyebrow effect to the ends of the houses, and helps wonderfully
to show off pretty faces just beneath them, looking out of windows.
All the windows open in the middle, outwards, like shutters; and it
would not be much risk to say that there is not a window-sill in all
Stavanger without flowers. Certainly, we did not see one in a three
hours' ramble. From an old watchtower, which stands on the top of the
first sharp hill above the harbor, is a sweeping off-look, seaward and
coastward, to north and south: long promontories, green and curving,
with low red roofs here and there, shot up into relief by the sharp
contrast of color; bays of blue water breaking in between; distant
ranges of mountains glittering white; thousands of islands in sight at
once. Stavanger's approach strikes Norway's key-note with a bold
hand, and old Norway and new Norway meet in Stavanger's market-place.
An old cathedral, the oldest but one in the country, looks down a
little inner harbor, where lie sloops loaded with gay pottery of
shapes and colors copied from the latest patterns out in
Staffordshire. These are made by peasants many miles away, on the
shores of the fjords: bowls, jars, flower-pots, jugs, and plates,
brown, cream-colored, red, and white; painted with flowers, and
decorated with Grecian and Etruscan patterns in simple lines. The
sloop decks are piled high with them,--a gay show, and an odd enough
freight to be at sea in a storm. The sailors' heads bob up and down
among the pots and pans, and the salesman sits flat on the deck, lost
from view, until a purchaser appears. Miraculously cheap this pottery
is, as well as fantastic of shape and color; one could fit out his
table off one of these crockery sloops, for next to nothing. Along the
wharves were market-stands of all sorts: old women selling fuchsias,
myrtles, carrots, and cabbages, and blueberries, all together; piles
of wooden shoes, too,--clumsy things, hollowed out of a single chunk
of wood, shaped like a Chinese junk keel, and coarsely daubed with
black paint on the outside; no heel to hold them on, and but little
toe. The racket made by shuffling along on pavements in them is
amazing, and "down at the heel" becomes a phrase of new significance,
after one has heard the thing done in Norway.
Just outside the market-place we came upon our first cariole; it was
going by like the wind, drawn by a little Norwegian pony, which seemed
part pincushion, part spaniel, part fat snowbird, and the rest pony,
with a shoe-brush, bristles up, for a mane. Such good-will in his
trot, and such a sense of honor and independence in the wriggle of his
head, and such affectionateness all over him, no wonder the Norwegians
love such a species of grown-up useful pet dogs. Hardy they are, and,
if they choose, swift; obey voices better than whips, and would rather
have bread than hay to eat, at any time of day. The cariole is a kind
of compressed sulky, open, without springs; the narrow seat, narrow
even for one person, set high up on elastic wooden shafts, which rest
on the axle-tree at the back, and on a sort of saddle-piece in front.
The horse is harnessed very far forward in the low thills, and has
the direct weight on his shoulders. A queerer sight than such a
vehicle as this, coming at a Norwegian pony's best rate towards you,
with a pretty Norwegian girl driving, and standing up on the
cross-piece behind her a handsome Norwegian officer, with his plumed
head above hers, bent a little to the right or left, and very close,
lovers of human nature in picturesque situations need not wish to see.
Less picturesque, and no doubt less happy for the time being, but no
less characteristic, was the first family we saw in Stavanger taking
an airing; a square wooden box for a wagon,--nothing more than a
vegetable bin on wheels. This held two large milk-cans, several
bushels of cabbages, four children, and their mother. The father
walked sturdily beside the wagon, his head bent down, like his pony's;
serious eyes, a resolute mouth, and a certain look of unjoyous content
marked him as a good specimen of the best sort of Norwegian peasant.
The woman and the children wore the same look of unjoyous and
unmirthful content; silent, serious, satisfied, they all sat still
among the cabbages. So solemn a thing is it to be born in latitude
north. Had those cabbages grown in the Campagna, the man would have
been singing, the woman laughing, and the young ones rolling about in
the cart like kittens.
From Stavanger to Bergen is a half-day's sail: in and out among
islands, promontories, inlets, rocks; now wide sea on one hand, and
rugged shore on the other; now a very archipelago of bits of land and
stone flung about in chaotic confusion, on all sides. Many of the
islands are nothing but low beds of granite, looking as if it were in
flaky slices like mica, or else minutely roughened and stippled, as
though cooled suddenly from a tremendous boil. Some of these islands
have oases of green in them; tiny red farm-houses, sunk in hollows,
with narrow settings of emerald around them; hand's-breadth patches of
grain here and there, left behind as from some harvest, which the
hungry sea is following after to glean. No language can describe the
fantastic, elusive charm of this islet and rocklet universe: half
sadness, half cheer, half lonely, half teeming, altogether brilliant
and brimming with beauty; green land, gray rock, and blue water,
surging, swaying, blending, parting, dancing together, in stately and
contagious pleasure. On the north horizon rise grand snow-topped
peaks; broad blue bays make up into the land walled by mountains; snow
fjelds and glaciers glitter in the distance; and waterfalls, like
silver threads, shine from afar on the misty clouds. At every new turn
is a hamlet or house, looking as if it had just crept into shelter;
one solitary boat moored at the base of its rock, often the only token
of a link kept with the outer world.
The half-day's sail from Stavanger to Bergen is all like this, except
that after one turns southward into the Bergen Fjord the mysterious
islanded shores press closer, and the hill shores back of them rise
higher, so that expectancy and wonder deepen moment by moment, till
the moment of landing on Bergen's water rim. "Will there be carriages
at the wharf?" we had asked of the terrible stewardess who had
tyrannized over our ship for two days, like a French Revolution
fishwoman. "Carriages!" she cried, with her arms akimbo. "The streets
in Bergen are so steep carriages can't drive down them. The horses
would tumble back on the carriage,"--a purely gratuitous fiction on
her part, for what motive it is hard to conceive. But it much enhanced
the interest with which we gazed at the rounding hills, slowly hemming
us in closer and closer, and looking quite steep enough to justify the
stewardess's assertion. By clocks, it was ten o'clock at night; by
sky, about dawn, or just after sunset; by air, atmosphere, light, no
time which any human being ever heard named or defined. There is
nothing in any known calendar of daylight, twilight, or nightlight
which is like this Norwegian interval between two lights. It is weird,
bewildering, disconcerting. You don't know whether you are glad or
sorry, pleased or scared; whether you really can see or not; whether
you'd better begin another day's work at once, or make believe it is
time to go to bed.
If somebody would invent a word which should bear the same
interesting, specific, and intelligible relation to light and dark
that "amphibious" does to land and water, it would be, in describing
Norway twilight, of more use than all the rest of the English language
put together. Perhaps the Norwegians have such a word. I think it
highly probable they have, and I wish I knew it.
In this strange illuminated twilight, we landed on the silent Bergen
wharf. The quay was in shadow of high warehouses. A few nonchalant and
leisurely men and boys were ambling about; custom-house men, speaking
the jargon of their race, went through the farce of appearing to
ransack our luggage. Our party seemed instantaneously to have
disintegrated, in the half darkness, into odds and ends of unassorted
boxes and people, and it was with gratitude as for a succession of
interpositions of a superior and invincible power that we finally
found ourselves together again in one hotel, and decided that, on the
whole, it was best to go to bed, in spite of the light, because, as it
was already near midnight, it would very soon be still lighter, and
there would be no going to bed at all.
The next day, we began Bergen by driving out of it (a good way always,
to begin a place). No going out of Bergen eastward or westward except
straight up skyward, so steep are the slopes. Southward the country
opens by gentler ascents, and pretty country houses are built along
the road for miles,--all of wood, and of light colors, with much
fantastic carving about them; summer-houses perched on the terraces,
among lime, birch, and ash trees. One which we saw was in octagon
shape, and had the roof thick sodded with grass, which waved in the
wind. The eight open spaces of the sides were draped with bright
scarlet curtains, drawn away tight on each side, making a Gothic arch
line of red at each opening. It looked like somebody's gay palanquin
set down to wait.
Our driver's name was Nils. He matched it: short, sturdy, and
good-natured; red cheeks and shining brown eyes. His ponies scrambled
along splendidly, and stopped to rest whenever they felt like it,--not
often, to be sure, but they had their own way whenever they did, and
were allowed to stand still. Generally they put their heads down and
started off of their own accord in a few seconds; occasionally Nils
reminded them by a chuckle to go on.
There is no need of any society for the prevention of cruelty to
animals in Norway. The Norwegian seems to be instinctively kind to all
beasts of bondage. At the foot of steep hills is to be seen everywhere
the sign, "Do not forget to rest the horses." The noise Nils made when
he wished to stop his ponies gave us a fright, the first time we
heard it. It is the drollest sound ever invented for such a use: a
loud call of rolling _r's_; an ingenious human parody on a watchman's
rattle; a cross between a bellow and a purr. It is universal in
Norway, but one can never become accustomed to it unless he has heard
it from infancy up.
The wild and wooded country through which we drove was like parts of
the northern hill country of New England: steep, stony hills; nooks
full of ferns; bits of meadow in sunlight and shadow, with clover, and
buttercups, and bluebells, and great mossy bowlders; farm-houses
snugged down in hollows to escape the wind; lovely dark tarns, with
pond-lilies afloat, just too far from the shore for arms to reach
them. Only when we met people, or when the great blue fjord gleamed
through the trees below us, did we know we were away from home. It is
a glory when an arm of the sea reaches up into the heart of a hill
country, so that men may sail to and from mountain bases. No wonder
that the Vikings went forth with the passion of conquering, and yet
forever returned and returned, with the passion of loving their _gamle
Norge_.
When we came back to the inn, we were invited into the landlady's own
parlor, and there were served to us wine and milk and sweet tarts, in
a gracious and simple hospitality. The landlady and her sister were
beautiful old ladies, well past sixty, with skins like peaches, and
bright eyes and quick smiles. High caps of white lace, trimmed with
sky-blue ribbons, and blue ostrich feathers laid on them like wreaths
above the forehead, gave to their expression a sort of infantile
elegance which was bewitching in its unworldliness; small white shawls
thrown over their shoulders, and reaching only just below the belt,
like those worn by old Quaker women, corroborated the simplicity of
the blue ribbons, and added to the charm. They had all the freshness
and spotlessness of Quakers, with color and plumes added; a
combination surely unique of its kind. One of these old ladies was as
gay a chatterer as if she were only seventeen. She had not one tooth
in her mouth; but her mouth was no more made ugly by the absence of
teeth, as are most old women's mouths, than a baby's mouth is made
ugly by the same lack. The lips were full and soft and red; her face
was not wrinkled; and when she talked and laughed and nodded, the blue
ostrich feathers bobbing above, she looked like some sort of
miraculous baby, that had learned to talk before "teething."
Her niece, who was our only interpreter, and too shy to use quickly
and fluently even the English she knew, was in despair at trying to
translate her. "It is too much, too much," she said. "I cannot follow;
I am too far behind," and she laughed as heartily as her aunt. The old
lady was brimful of stories: she had known Bergen, in and out, for
half a century, and forgotten nothing. It was a great pleasure to set
her going, and get at her narrative by peeps, as one sees a landscape
through chinks in a fence, when one is whirling by in a railway train.
One of her best stories was of "the man who was brought back from the
dead by coffee."