and women,
and others only infants, the poor patriarch sat pale and sickly at the
family board; and the melancholy shade that kept flitting over his
countenance, though he smiled and rose to greet us, told of some blight
that had fallen on his hopes; for he resumed his seat apart, and
crossing his thin hands on his lap, gave no other notice of his presence
than an occasional sigh, uttered deeply and involuntarily. Except the
old man, they all eat fast and greedily of a kind of white mixture, or
porridge, collected in a large wooden basin.

Leaving this place, we pursued our journey through a country intersected
by rugged mountains, whose summits, denuded of all verdure, rose high
and imposingly to Heaven, but their bases were clothed with the cheerful
birch, the fir and pine, and here and there, a little knoll of grass
shining, like an emerald, amid this wilderness of rock. Herds of cattle,
interspersed with goats and sheep, hung over the edges of the
precipices, browsing on the tufts of green food that sprouted from the
jagged crags. The road wound through narrow mountain-passes, nearly
choked up with huge fragments of rock, the parent mountains on either
hand rising perpendicularly to an enormous height; and where a ravine
yawned, as if to cheer the heart and eye saddened and wearied by the
desolate monotony of stony fell and inhospitable hill, a forest of firs
would creep, sloping, to their very summits. Far above our heads, only
the fleecy clouds breaking into a variety of forms as they moved slowly
along the mountain sides, and the raven's hoarse cry, or the shrill
scream of the eagle, broke the prevailing solitude of scene and sound.

Many of the peasants whom we encountered on the way, wore red caps and
short jackets scarcely descending below their arm-pits, covered
elaborately with small conical silver buttons; and while some of them
concluded their attire with breeches extending to the knees and there
clasped with buckles, others, more fantastic in taste, preferred the
loose trowsers of the Ottoman. Hair, prodigiously long, flowing slovenly
over the shoulders, was common to all. Hats were worn, but they may be
exceptions. A blue petticoat, blue as their beautiful sky, and a jacket
bound by a scarlet sash around the waist, and a coloured silk kerchief
wreathed about the head, its two ends projecting, like the wings of
Mercury's cap, behind each ear, appeared to constitute the ordinary
costume of the Norwegian p