t,
but the houses had not the same air of thrift and comfort as in
Dalecarlia. The population also changed in character, the faces we now
saw being less bright, cheerful, and kindly, and the forms less tall and
strongly knit.

We had very fair accommodations, at all the post-stations along the
road, and found the people everywhere honest and obliging. Still, I
missed the noble simplicity which I had admired so much in the natives
of Westerdal, and on the frontier of Wermeland,--the unaffected kindness
of heart, which made me look upon every man as a friend.

The large town of Sala, where we spent a night, was filled with
fugitives from Upsala, where the cholera was making great ravages. The
violence of the disease was over by the time we arrived; but the
students, all of whom had left, had not yet returned, and the fine old
place had a melancholy air. The first thing we saw on approaching it,
was a funeral. Professor Bergfalk, who had remained at his post, and to
whom I had letters, most kindly gave me an entire day of his time. I saw
the famous _Codex argenteus_, in the library, the original manuscript of
Frithiof's Saga, the journals of Swedenborg and Linnaeus, the Botanical
Garden, and the tombs of Gustavus Vasa and John III. in the cathedral.
But most interesting of all was our drive to Old Upsala, where we
climbed upon the mound of Odin, and drank mead out of the silver-mounted
drinking horn, from which Bernadotte, Oscar, and the whole royal family
of Sweden, are in the habit of drinking when they make a pilgrimage to
the burial place of the Scandinavian gods.

A cold, pale, yellow light lay upon the landscape; the towers of Upsala
Cathedral, and the massive front of the palace, rose dark against the
sky, in the south-west; a chill autumnal wind blew over the plains, and
the yellowing foliage of the birch drifted across the mysterious mounds,
like those few golden leaves of poetry, which the modern bards of the
North have cast upon the grave of the grand, muscular religion of the
earlier race. There was no melodious wailing in the wind, like that
which proclaimed "Pan is dead!" through the groves of Greece and Ionia;
but a cold rustling hiss, as if the serpent of Midgard were exulting
over the ruin of Walhalla. But in the stinging, aromatic flood of the
amber-coloured mead, I drank to Odin, to Balder, and to Freja.

We reached Stockholm on the 22nd of September, in the midst of a furious
gale, accompanied with