blue and bright in the morning sun, while away beyond
it stretched a great semicircle of rolling hills covered with green
farms, dotted with red farm-houses, and here and there a white church
glimmering like a spangle on the breast of the landscape. Behind this
soft, warm, beautiful region, rose dark, wooded hills, with lofty
mountain-ridges above them, until, far and faint, under and among the
clouds, streaks of snow betrayed some peaks of the Nore Fjeld, sixty or
seventy miles distant. This is one of the most famous views in Norway,
and has been compared to that from the Righi, but without sufficient
reason. The sudden change, however, from the gloomy wilderness through
which you first pass to the sunlit picture of the enchanting lake, and
green, inhabited hills and valleys, may well excuse the raptures of
travellers. Ringerike, the realm of King Ring, is a lovely land, not
only as seen from this eagle's nest, but when you have descended upon
its level. I believe the monarch's real name was Halfdan the Black. So
beloved was he in life that after death his body was divided into four
portions, so that each province might possess some part of him. Yet the
noblest fame is transitory, and nobody now knows exactly where any one
of his quarters was buried.

A terrible descent, through a chasm between perpendicular cliffs some
hundreds of feet in height, leads from Krogkleven to the level of the
Tyri Fjord. There is no attempt here, nor indeed upon the most of the
Norwegian roads we travelled, to mitigate, by well-arranged curves, the
steepness of the hills. Straight down you go, no matter of how breakneck
a character the declivity may be. There are no drags to the carrioles
and country carts, and were not the native horses the toughest and
surest-footed little animals in the world, this sort of travel would be
trying to the nerves.

Our ride along the banks of the Tyri Fjord, in the clear morning
sunshine, was charming. The scenery was strikingly like that on the lake
of Zug, in Switzerland, and we missed the only green turf, which this
year's rainless spring had left brown and withered. In all Sweden we had
seen no such landscapes, not even in Norrland. There, however, the
_people_ carried off the palm. We found no farm-houses here so stately
and clean as the Swedish, no such symmetrical forms and frank, friendly
faces. The Norwegians are big enough, and strong enough, to be sure, but
their carriage is awkward, and their f