here turns westward to
the low water-shed dividing it from the famous Romsdal, rose two or
three snow-streaked peaks of the Hurunger Fjeld; and the drifts filling
the ravines of the mountains on our left descended lower and lower into
the valley.

At Dombaas, a lonely station at the foot of the Dovre Fjeld, we turned
northward into the heart of the mountains. My postillion, a boy of
fifteen, surprised me by speaking very good English. He had learned it
in the school at Drontheim. Sometimes, he said, they had a schoolmaster
in the house, and sometimes one at Jerkin, twenty miles distant. Our
road ascended gradually through half-cut woods of red pine, for two or
three miles, after which it entered a long valley, or rather basin,
belonging to the table land of the Dovre Fjeld. Stunted heath and
dwarfed juniper-bushes mixed with a grey, foxy shrub-willow, covered the
soil, and the pale yellow of the reindeer moss stained the rocks. Higher
greyer and blacker ridges hemmed in the lifeless landscape; and above
them, to the north and west, broad snow-fields shone luminous under the
heavy folds of the clouds. We passed an old woman with bare legs and
arms, returning from a _soter_, or summer chalet of the shepherds. She
was a powerful but purely animal specimen of humanity,--"beef to the
heel," as Braisted said. At last a cluster of log huts, with a patch of
green pasture-ground about them, broke the monotony of the scene. It
was Fogstuen, or next station, where we were obliged to wait half an
hour until the horses had been caught and brought in. The place had a
poverty stricken air; and the slovenly woman who acted as landlady
seemed disappointed that we did not buy some horridly coarse and ugly
woolen gloves of her own manufacture.

Our road now ran for fourteen miles along the plateau of the Dovre, more
than 3000 feet above the level of the sea. This is not a plain or table
land, but an undulating region, with hills, valleys, and lakes of its
own; and more desolate landscapes one can scarcely find elsewhere.
Everything is grey, naked, and barren, not on a scale grand enough to be
imposing, nor with any picturesqueness of form to relieve its sterility.
One can understand the silence and sternness of the Norwegians, when he
has travelled this road. But I would not wish my worst enemy to spend
more than one summer as a solitary herdsman on these hills. Let any
disciple of Zimmerman try the effect of such a solitude. The statis