such as old plate, drinking-cups, spoons, and silver goblets bearing the
marks of age, and the date of centuries past. A little experience is apt
to create doubt, in the genuineness of these articles, which, like those
found in the curiosity shops of Japan, are very generally manufactured
in this present year of our Lord, however they may be dated.

A drive of a few miles inland upon the charming roads in any direction
will fill the stranger with delight, and afford characteristic pictures
of great beauty. The farmers hang their cut grass upon frames of wood to
dry, as we do clothes upon a rope on washing-days. These frames are
placed in the mowing-fields, in rows of a hundred feet in length and a
hundred feet apart, and are about five feet in height. Agricultural
tools used upon the farms are of the most primitive character; the
ploughs in many parts of the country are single-handed, and as awkward
as the rude implement used for the purpose to-day in Egypt. The country
houses are low and mostly thatched, the roof being often covered with
soil, and are not infrequently rendered attractive with blooming heather
and little blue and pink blossoms planted by Nature's hand,--the
hieroglyphics in which she writes her impromptu poetry. In the meadows
between the hills are sprinkled harebells, as blue as the azure veins on
a delicate face; while here and there patches of large red clover-heads
are seen nodding heavily with their wealth of golden sweets. Further
away, in solitary glens, white anemones delight the eye, in company with
ferns of tropical variety in form and color. The blossoms of the
multebaer, almost identical with that of the strawberry, are abundant.
The humidity of the atmosphere favors floral development. All through
Scandinavia one meets these bright mosaics of the soil with a sense of
surprise, they are so delicate, so frail, creations of such short life,
yet lovely beyond compare, born upon the verge of constant frost.

While rambling afield one meets occasionally a peasant who bows low,
removing his hat as the stranger passes. Without evincing the servility
of the common people of Japan, they yet exhibit all their native
courtesy. Now and again the road passes through pine forests, still and
aromatic, the soil carpeted with leaves, where, if one pauses to listen,
there comes a low, undefined murmur of vegetable and insect life, like
the sound that greets the ear when applied to an empty sea-shell. Some
w