Time and again quaint scraps of English had dropped upon our ears from Rovaniemi lips, and here on the river-bank the secret came out as to where they had come from. It seemed that a Britisher had long been resident in Rovaniemi, and we were told his name, and the town in Wales where he came from. He was not "merchant," he was "tourist"--that is, he was not engaged in business. And as his "tour" had apparently lasted ten years, during which time he had not moved outside Rovaniemi, we wondered what he had done at home to make so long an absence advisable.
Judging from the few scraps of Anglo-Saxon which he had left behind him, this Welshman must have been a person of pretty wit, or else a fellow of most blasphemous habits. Each of the Finns who had been his cronies possessed a sentence of English, laboriously taught and remembered; and each, as he tossed off his peg of fly tincture, pridefully repeated his lesson as a toast to our health. Need one add that the time-honoured joke had been repeated, and that each Finn's _repertoire_ of English consisted of a fantastic soul-curdling oath? Still, as the Welshman had occupied ten years in manufacturing the joke, one cannot do less than record his complete success.
We made many friends in Rovaniemi, and left the town with real regret, but we had to be moving on. The courtyard was crowded with people come to see us off, and I think they were sorry also. Circuses are rare in Rovaniemi.
We drove out past the church, and the white shutters of its pagoda-shaped bell-tower were open, and the bells were ringing out and carrying their message to the scattered farms up and down the valley.
Slowly they dimmed into the distance behind us, and for forty kilometres we travelled through forests of slender pines peopled apparently by noisy, quarrelling magpies alone. And then habitations began again, with fields set before and behind them, though most of these were little better than half-drained swamps, which would grow nothing richer than reeds and rushes.
We were getting very bad horses on these stages, and the crudest possible vehicles. As I have said, the short trace on the horse-collar is joined to the shaft with a toggle, and the backhand of the saddle is fastened to the trace, and so if this toggle falls out, down go the shafts on to the ground, and nothing short of a miracle can save a bad spill. We saw ten such miracles in one day.