Torneo, as a town, is less neat. It is liberally planted with gardens containing little creeper-covered arbours, in which it is the height of the Finn's ambition to sit and smoke, and gloat over the fact that other people are fools enough to work. There is a pretty Lutheran church in black and white outside Torneo, with a tall, slender spire, and away from the church is a quaint bell-tower, also in magpie colours. An enclosure of stone hedges them both in, and inside the enclosure is a coppice of mountain ashes shadowing the graves. The Russian church in Torneo is set at a street corner in the middle of the town. It is an ornate little building in white and two tints of brown, with an elaborate cupola and coloured windows. It was suggestive of a kiosk in an exhibition where one might reasonably expect to buy somebody or other's cocoa from comely young damsels in uniform.
There is a hospital in Torneo, which held two curious patients. One was a Lapp, the only one in the district. He had come down to Matarangi, which is fifty miles farther up the Torneo River, to sell his deer at the annual fair. He was outside Russian territory there and drink was plentiful, and in that commodity he made heavy investments. During his subsequent adventures he broke both thighs, nobody seemed to know how, and his friends brought him down to hospital, and left him there to return to their eternal deer-herding.
The other patient was a Tartar, and he also was in the accident ward. He was by no means an uncommon person to find so far out of his native latitude. Swarthy Tartar tramps, in face almost as dark as a mulatto, permeate the country as beggars and horsedealers. They wear European clothes, and are generally accompanied by their women and children. Very often they have been born in Finland. They are thieves and vagabonds, the horses they sell are poor, and they occupy much the same position as the gipsy did a hundred years ago at home. They are hedge-bottom nomads, and the _Wanderlust_ is too strong in them ever to let them settle for long. It is on record that at times they have taken farms and tried to sit down and breed horses; but it is not on record that they have ever succeeded in staying three years in one place. They are quite without shame, morals, or common honesty; their most valued roof is a farmer's outhouse; their one ambition in life is to keep just beyond starvation. Even the Finns despise them, just as the Swedes despise the Finns.