government maintains posting-stations at the farms along the main
travelled highways, where you can hire horses and carriages of various
kinds. There are also English tourist agencies which make a business of
providing travellers with complete transportation. You may try either of
these methods alone, or you may make a judicious mixture.

Thus, by an application of the theory of permutations and combinations,
you have your choice among four ways of accomplishing a driving-tour.
First, you may engage a carriage and pair, with a driver, from one of
the tourist agencies, and roll through your journey in sedentary case,
provided your horses do not go lame or give out. Second, you may rely
altogether upon the posting-stations to send you on your journey; and
this is a very pleasant, lively way, provided there is not a crowd
of travellers on the road before you, who take up all the comfortable
conveyances and leave you nothing but a jolting cart or a ramshackle
KARIOL of the time of St. Olaf. Third, you may rent an easy-riding
vehicle (by choice a well-hung gig) for the entire trip, and change
ponies at the stations as you drive along; this is the safest way. The
fourth method is to hire your horseflesh at the beginning for the whole
journey, and pick up your vehicles from place to place. This method is
theoretically possible, but I do not know any one who has tried it.

Our gig was waiting for us at Odnaes. There was a brisk little
mouse-coloured pony in the shafts; and it took but a moment to strap our
leather portmanteau on the board at the back, perch the postboy on top
of it, and set out for our first experience of a Norwegian driving-tour.

The road at first was level and easy; and we bowled along smoothly
through the valley of the Etnaelv, among drooping birch-trees and green
fields where the larks were singing. At Tomlevolden, ten miles farther
on, we reached the first station, a comfortable old farmhouse, with a
great array of wooden outbuildings. Here we had a chance to try our
luck with the Norwegian language in demanding "en hest, saa straxt som
muligt." This was what the guide-book told us to say when we wanted a
horse.

There is great fun in making a random cast on the surface of a strange
language. You cannot tell what will come up. It is like an experiment in
witchcraft. We should not have been at all surprised, I must confess, if
our preliminary incantation had brought forth a cow or a basket of eggs.