The Finn, on the other hand, is much more ordinary in his attire and much less picturesque. Take away his high boots and he might be almost anybody. The boots, however, are certainly a feature. They are peaked at the toe like the Lapp's, heelless, and have soles and sides all in a piece. The leg part is of soft leather, and can be drawn up above mid-thigh if wished; but it is generally worn telescoped, with the baggy top well below the knee-cap, after the fashion of mediæval villains in Surrey-side melodramas. For the rest, he is clothed in a coat, waistcoat, and trousers, scanty of buttons, and with a cut suggestive of a Leeds clothing factory; carries a thin moustache; and more infrequently than not wears some physical deformity. His woman-kind are distinctly his better half, and probably keep him from starvation. They are bustling and active, utterly devoid of any pretence to figure, and as a rule gratuitously ugly. They affect, in the summer, garments of checked cotton, which they weave themselves, and though they also wear the high boots, the tops of these are discreetly hidden by a skirt of decent length.
We smoked complacently deep into that sunlit night, and thought with pleasure of the sail which was to come amongst the islands of the great lake. But we were not done with our old carriers yet. They wanted payment, and the squint-eyed man came in to say so. We had the money ready for him, counted out, in rouble notes. It lay trimly in a heap. We pointed it out. He inspected, and at once began to object. He desired payment in kroner or marks; and not having either, we could not well give it to him. We pointed out (using the words of the Russian consul at Vardö) that in Russian territory the rouble was legal tender. He seemed partially to grasp this, and suggested exchange at the rate of one rouble (which is worth some two-and-a-penny, English) for the Norwegian krone (which may be valued at thirteen-pence-halfpenny), and became abusive when we declined to fall in with his ideas. He was not a person to whom we owed any gratitude or much consideration, but I think he was surprised at the pace with which he was ejected from the room.
The community here at Ischinlisvuoni had reindeer, which they pastured in the forest, but they did not meddle with these much during the summer months. Indeed they looked upon them much as capital to be drawn upon in time of need during the winter. During the six months of day they lived, to a large extent, on the produce of the cows, the curdled milk, butter, and butter milk, eked out with fish from the lake. But these fish, with some natural perversity, they never ate fresh. The spoils of the nets were always gutted, split open, perfunctorily dried, and then devoured raw in a partly decayed state. There is something in the theory: salmon, boiled or fried, is the most nauseating dish in the world if one has too much of it, as witness the bargain in the old days of the Newcastle apprentices, that they were not to dine off salmon more than twice a week. Salmon, well kippered, and eaten in thin slices, raw, does not cloy one nearly so much. But when the kippering is imperfect, not to say sketchy; or when the fish is not kippered at all, but merely more or less dried, and, moreover, is not salmon or any of his relatives, but some little soft, white fish like a sloppy trout; then the theory falls to the ground.