brawny chests, and the massive muscles of their legs and arms.
During the whole voyage, I saw but one man who appeared to be diseased.
Such men, I suspect, were the Vikings--rough, powerful, ugly, dirty
fellows, with a few primitive virtues, and any amount of robust vices.
We noticed, however, a marked change for the better in the common
people, as we advanced northward. They were altogether better dressed,
better mannered, and more independent and intelligent, but with a hard,
keen, practical expression of face, such as one finds among the shoremen
of New-England. The school system of Norway is still sadly deficient,
but there is evidently no lack of natural capacity among these people.
Their prevailing vice is intemperance, which here, as in all other parts
of the country, is beginning to diminish since restrictions have been
placed upon the manufacture and sale of spirituous liquors,
simultaneously with the introduction of cheap and excellent fermented
drinks. The statistics of their morality also show a better state of
things than in the South. There is probably no country population in the
world where licentiousness prevails to such an extent as in the
districts of Guldbrandsdal and Hedemark.

A voyage of four hours across the West Fjord brought us to the little
village of Balstad, at the southern end of West-Vaagoe. The few red,
sod-roofed houses were built upon a rocky point, behind which were some
patches of bright green pasture, starred with buttercups, overhung by a
splendid peak of dark-red rock, two thousand feet in height. It was a
fine frontispiece to the Lofoden scenery which now opened before us.
Running along the coast of West and East Vaagoe, we had a continual
succession of the wildest and grandest pictures--thousand feet
precipices, with turrets and needles of rock piercing the sky, dazzling
snow-fields, leaking away in cataracts which filled the ravines with
foam, and mazes of bald, sea-worn rocks, which seem to have been thrown
down from the scarred peaks in some terrible convulsion of nature. Here
and there were hollows, affording stony pasturage for a few sheep and
cows and little wooden fisher-huts stood on the shore in the arms of
sheltered coves. At the village of Svolvaer, which is built upon a pile
of bare stones, we took on board a number of ladies in fashionable
dresses, with bonnets on the backs of their heads and a sufficiency of
cumbrous petticoats to make up for the absence of hoops, wh