ort petticoats:
and all the fattest are the smartest; indeed, they have gourds of milk
beside them, and are drinking it all day long to keep themselves fat. No
sooner however is Lucy led in among them, than they all close round,
some singing and dancing, and others laughing for joy, and crying,
"Welcome little daughter, from the land of spirits!" and then she finds
out that they think she is really Tojo's little sister, who died ten
moons ago, come back again from the grave as a white spirit.

Tojo's own mother, a very fat woman indeed, holds out her arms, as big
as bed-posts and terribly greasy, gives her a dose of sour milk out of a
gourd, makes her lie down with her head in her lap, and begins to sing
to her, till Lucy goes to sleep; and wakes, very glad to see the
crocodile as brown and hard and immovable as ever; and that odd round
gourd with a little hole in it, hanging up from the ceiling.

CHAPTER VII.

LAPLANDERS.

"IT shall not be a hot country next time," said Lucy, "though, after
all, the whale oil was not much worse than the castor oil.--Mother
Bunch, did your whaler always go to Greenland, and never to any nicer
place?"

"Well, Missie, once we were driven between foul winds and icebergs up
into a fiord near North Cape, right at midsummer, and I'll never forget
what we saw there."

[Illustration: And here beside her was a little fellow with a bow and
arrows, such as she had never seen before.

_Page 64._]

Lucy was not likely to forget, either, for she found herself standing by
a narrow inlet of sea, as blue and smooth as a lake, and closely shut
in, except on the west, with red rocky hills and precipices with
pine-trees growing on them, except where the bare rock was too steep, or
where on a somewhat smoother shelf stood a timbered house, with a
farm-yard and barns all round it. But the odd thing was that the sun was
where she had never seen him before,--quite in the north, making all the
shadows come the wrong way. But how came the sun to be visible at all so
very late? Ah! she knew it now; this was Norway, and there was no night
at all!

And here beside her was a little fellow with a bow and arrows, such as
she had never seen before, except in the hands of the little Cupids in
the pictures in the drawing-room. Mother Bunch had said that the little
brown boys in India looked like the bronze Cupid who was on the
mantelshelf, but this little boy was white, or rather sallow-faced, and
we