The 'stations' or farmhouses are almost entirely built of wood, but those of a superior class have a single room of stone, used only in bridals or births, a custom handed down from old times when a place of special safety was required at those seasons.
Nine-tenths of the country are covered with pine-forests, but the trees are always cut down before they grow old. We did not see a single old tree in Norway. The pines are of two kinds only—the _Furu_, our pine, _Pinus silvestris_; and the _Gran_, our fir, _Pinus abies_.
Wolves seldom appear except in winter, when those who travel in sledges are often pursued by them. Then hunger makes them so bold that they will often snatch a dog from between the knees of a driver.
From the station of Dombaas (where there is a telegraph station and a shop of old silver) we turned aside down the Romsdal, which soon became beautiful, as the road wound above the chrysoprase river Rauma, broken by many rocky islets and swirling into many waterfalls, but always equally radiant, equally transparent, till its colour is washed out by the melting snow in a ghastly narrow valley, which we called the Valley of Death.
The little inn at Aak, in Romsdal, with a large garden stretching along the hillside, disappointed us at first, as the clouds hid the mountain-tops, but morning revealed how glorious they are—purple pinnacles of rock or pathless fields of snow embossed upon a sky which is delicately blue above but melts into the clearest opal. Grander, we thought, than any single peak in Switzerland is the tremendous peak of the Romsdalhorn, and the walks in all directions are most exquisite—into deep glades filled with columbines and the giant larkspurs, which are such a feature of Norway: into tremendous mountain gorges: or to Waeblungsnaes, along the banks of the lovely fyord, with its marvellously quaint forms of mountain distance. Aak is a place where a month may be spent most delightfully, as well as most comfortably and economically.
We had heard a great deal before we went to Norway about the difficulty of getting proper food, but our own experience is that we were never fed more luxuriously. Perhaps very late in the season the provisions at the country 'stations' may be somewhat used up, but when we were there in July only those who could not live without a great deal of meat could have any cause for complaint, and once a week we generally had reindeer for a treat. When we arrived in the evenings, we always found an excellent meal prepared—the most delicious coffee, tea, and cream; baskets of bread, rusks, cakes and biscuits of various descriptions; fresh salmon and trout; cloudberries, bilberries, raspberries, mountain strawberries and cream; and for all this about a franc and a half is the payment required.