Ticket No. 9672 | Page 5

The spruce rafters
and weather-boarding have acquired such hardness and toughness with
age that the sharpest hatchet can make little or no impression upon
them. Between the roughly hewn rafters, which are placed horizontally
one above the other, a mixture of clay and turf forms a stanch roof,
through which the hardest winter rains can not force their way.
Upstairs, in the bedrooms, the ceilings are painted in dark red or black
tints to contrast with the more cheerful and delicate hues of the
wood-work.
In one corner of the large hall stands a huge cylinder stove, the pipe of
which rises nearly to the ceiling, before it disappears in the kitchen
chimney. In another corner stands a tall clock which emits a sonorous
tick-tack, as its carved hands travel slowly around its enameled face.
Here is a secretary, black with age, side by side with a massive iron
tripod. Upon the mantel is an immense terra-cotta candlestick which
can be transformed into a three-branched candelabrum by turning it
upside down. The handsomest furniture in the house adorns this
spacious hall--the birch-root table, with its spreading feet, the big chest
with its richly wrought brass handles, in which the Sunday and holiday
clothing is kept, the tall arm-chair, hard and uncomfortable as a
church-pew, the painted wooden chairs, and the spinning-wheel striped
with green, to contrast with the scarlet petticoat of the spinner.

Yonder stands the pot in which the butter is kept, and the paddle with
which it is worked, and here is the tobacco-box, and the grater of
elaborately carved bone.
And, finally, over the door which opens into the kitchen is a large
dresser, with long rows of brass and copper cooking-utensils and
bright-colored dishes, the little grindstone for sharpening knives,
half-buried in its varnished case, and the egg-dish, old enough to serve
as a chalice.
And how wonderful and amusing are the walls, hung with linen
tapestries representing scenes from the Bible, and brilliant with all the
gorgeous coloring of the pictures of Epinal.
As for the guests' rooms, though they are less pretentious, they are no
less comfortable, with their spotless neatness, their curtains of
hanging-vines that droop from the turf-covered roof, their huge beds,
sheeted with snowy and fragrant linen, and their hangings with verses
from the Old Testament, embroidered in yellow upon a red ground.
Nor must we forget that the floor of the main hall, and the floors of all
the rooms, both upstairs and down, are strewn with little twigs of birch,
pine, and juniper, whose leaves fill the house with their healthful and
exhilarating odor.
Can one imagine a more charming posada in Italy, or a more seductive
fonda in Spain? No. And the crowd of English tourists have not yet
raised the scale of prices as in Switzerland--at least, they had not at the
time of which I write. In Dal, the current coin is not the pound sterling,
the sovereign of which the travelers' purse is soon emptied. It is a silver
coin, worth about five francs, and its subdivisions are the mark, equal
in value to about a franc, and the skilling, which must not be
confounded with the English shilling, as it is only equivalent to a
French sou.
Nor will the tourist have any opportunity to use or abuse the pretentious
bank-note in the Telemark. One-mark notes are white; five-mark notes
are blue; ten-mark notes are yellow; fifty-mark notes, green; one

hundred mark notes, red. Two more, and we should have all the colors
of the rainbow.
Besides--and this is a point of very considerable importance--the food
one obtains at the Dal inn is excellent; a very unusual thing at houses of
public entertainment in this locality, for the Telemark deserves only too
well its surname of the Buttermilk Country. At Tiness, Listhus, Tinoset,
and many other places, no bread is to be had, or if there be, it is of such
poor quality as to be uneatable. One finds there only an oaten cake,
known as flat brod, dry, black, and hard as pasteboard, or a coarse loaf
composed of a mixture of birch-bark, lichens, and chopped straw. Eggs
are a luxury, and a most stale and unprofitable one; but there is any
quantity of poor beer to be had, a profusion of buttermilk, either sweet
or sour, and sometimes a little coffee, so thick and muddy that it is
much more like distilled soot than the products of Mocha or Rio
Nunez.
In Dame Hansen's establishment, on the contrary, cellar and larder were
alike well-stored. What more could the most exacting tourist ask than
salmon, either salt or smoked--fresh salmon that have never tasted
tainted waters, fish from the pure streams of the Telemark, fowls,
neither too fat nor too lean, eggs in every style,