Late in the afternoon I returned to the new Uppsala; and just before sunset I left for Gefle, which is farther to the north, and is the port and metropolis of Norrland. In Gefle nearly four score years ago my father was born; and some Swedish relatives still live there. These were the attractions which brought me there. From the ordinary tourist point of view the place has little of interest. It is a clean, pretty city, however, with a population of about thirty-five thousand. Gefle is really the oldest town in Norrland, as the northern part of Sweden is called, but it looks very new and modern with its broad tree-planted boulevards and its handsome stone theatre and school and municipal buildings. This is because it has been almost completely rebuilt since 1869, when it was swept by a fire which destroyed all of the landmarks of my father’s boyhood days.

Gefle has one possession of which she is very proud, and justly so. This is her park—one of the finest of the sort in Sweden. It has all of the features which characterize the Swedish park—thick clumps of evergreens and birches, with velvety stretches of grass between, blazing flower beds, graceful fountains playing here and there, artistically bridged mirrorlike streams upon which the lilies grow—and in addition it has a palm garden. There they were growing, evidently in perfect contentment—a large number and variety of palm trees. Gefle, you should know, is north of the latitude of the southern extremity of Greenland; therefore, I marveled greatly and could scarcely believe my eyes. But it was no miracle, as my cousin who was walking through the park with me explained. Those enterprising Swedes set out the palms every spring and dig them up and return them to the greenhouse every autumn.

As time pressed, my visit in Gefle was very short. Early last Wednesday morning I left there to the accompaniment of Swedish cousinly bows and cordial “Adjös” and “Hälsa hemms.” My destination was Söderhamn (South Haven), my present address, which, like Gefle, is on the Gulf of Bothnia, but still farther north. For my journey here, through a mistake, I selected a freight train which carries lumber, instead of an express. But it was really a very fortunate blunder, for the trip was much more interesting than one in the orthodox express would have been. To the north of Gefle is Sweden’s great lumbering district, which we soon entered. It is a rugged region covered with magnificent evergreen forests, dotted here and there by small clearings brightened by the typical red-painted houses with white trimmings. The oat and clover hay grown on the cleared patches was hung on wire clothes-line-like racks to dry. Occasionally I noticed farmers hauling hay in long, very low-wheeled wagons. These vehicles, as compared with the American hay racks, have a decidedly Dachshund appearance. The object of the small wheels is evidently to lower the centre of gravity, and thus prevent the wagons from upsetting upon the steep hillsides. The little barns in which the hay is stored are queer cage-like structures with walls sloping outward from the floors. They are apparently so built to guard against damp weather.

As we journeyed north, the country became more rugged, and the forests grander. The painted board houses gave way to a considerable extent to rough-hewn log ones, and the people took on a more back-woodsy, mountaineer appearance. Among the forest homes I saw several women who were both barefooted and bareheaded. They were at work under the pale slant rays of the Northern sun and seemed perfectly healthy and happy.

While I am dwelling near Sweden’s broad northern frontier, I wish to digress sufficiently to tell you what I recently learned of the work-cottages of Norrbotten, the most northern province of Sweden. These cottages originated in a threatened famine in the region, due to failure of crops, in 1902. The people of the isolated district called upon their neighbors to the south for help; and they did not call in vain. Even Swedes living in America contributed to the relief work; and, thanks to the far-extending railroads, food reached the starving people in time. In the remotest and most seriously afflicted parishes temporary homes were established for the feeding of more than four hundred children. After all danger of starvation had passed, the leaders in the relief work came to see that such children’s homes were a continual need in the region. Dirt and disease, indifference and ignorance, had long ruled in the far-northern land. This state of affairs was a result of the isolation and the depressing effect of the long, dark, cold winters, as well as of the lack of educational facilities; for in this bleak, sparsely-populated territory the regular compulsory education laws cannot be enforced.

Partly through private benevolence, partly through State contribution, the work-cottages, now eight in number, were put upon a permanent basis. And there they are now, engaged in a splendid work. They are educational institutions of the first order—doing for the backward frontiers people what the settlement houses do for the slum in the American city—and more. The needy children remain at the work-cottages for nine months of the year for a period of four or five years, during which time they undergo a transforming process. They are taught personal cleanliness and orderliness, and love and patience and self-control; they are taught to work with their hands and to think with their heads. And when their course is finished, they return to their homes and bring the salvation of intelligence to dark places. More than half of the children thus befriended are Lapps, and speak the Lapp tongue; but they learn Swedish in the work-cottages. For the more nomadic Lapps, Norway, as well as Sweden, has provided ambulatory schools which migrate from camp to camp with the pupils.

Thus Scandinavia is doing for her remote Northern population, both Mongolian and white, a work such as we should be engaged in in the interest of the mountain whites and the Negroes of our Southern States.

At Kilafors, where I changed trains for Söderhamn on the coast to the east, it was necessary to wait two hours. Kilafors is tiny but interesting. The great dark trees press in on every side so closely as to give the little village the appearance of having been made to order and lowered with derricks into a deep hole cut in the forest to receive it. When we reached Kilafors it was well past noon, and, as there was no dining car on the freight train, I was about starved upon arriving. There seemed to be but one eating house in the place, and that was a large wooden hotel, already closed, as it was past the hour for the noon meal. Hope sprang again, however, when I saw a plain little bakery sign up the trail-like street, and I lost no time in reaching it. Swedish bakeries—at least country ones—are arranged rear part before, the work room opening upon the street and the salesroom being at the back, where the wares are mostly stored away in boxes, and not displayed in show-cases, as in the United States.

I bought some nice little cakes and some zwieback, and when I had paid for my purchases, the bakerman, his curiosity evidently roused by my bad Swedish and my foreign appearance, asked whether I was a Russian.

I promptly replied that I was not.

Was I a German, then, he asked.

I replied more promptly and more emphatically that I was not a German. Then, as his repertoire of possible nationalities seemed to be exhausted, I volunteered the information that I was an American.

His face lit up with vivid interest. “Ja så!” he exclaimed. (“Ja så,” is an interjection employed by Scandinavians to express almost the whole range of emotion.)

“Yes,” said I, “I am a Californian.”

California, the Land of Gold! The bakerman’s excitement increased many fold.

“Ja så!” he cried again, and stared me over from top to toe. I started toward the outer door, and had to cross the workroom on an oblique line in order to do so. Three men were rolling dough in the corner. With my first move to go, the bakerman hurried toward his three colleagues; and as neither side of a triangle is as long as its hypothenuse, he reached the men before I gained the door. He whispered excitedly. The three dropped their rolling pins, and in the few seconds before I made my escape all four stared at me, as frankly and naturally as do a group of youngsters before a cage of monkeys. This was scarcely a result of bad manners; it was rather due to the temporary and legitimate waiving of the code of etiquette in the interest of science, so to speak. An opportunity to see a “genuine Californian” does not often present itself in this north country, which is far from the beaten track of tourists. Probably nothing short of a Patagonian or an Ainu could produce equivalent excitement in the country districts of the United States. I suppose, however, that, had the bakermen known that I was of Scandinavian parentage, their interest in me would have been much less keen.

I took my bakery wares and some additional ones obtained at a grocer’s into the forest and had a picnic luncheon under the trees. After that, I walked around and explored the place. On the outskirts of the village I found to my astonishment a large merry-go-round, all fitted up with wooden steeds of many colors, ready to rear and prance when the power should be turned on. The merry-go-round was “made in America”!

On the wall of the waiting room in the railroad station was a “Prayer of the Horse,” which had been put up by the Society of Swedish Women for the Protection of Animals. It is needed up in that forest region where the labor of the horse is heavy.

As train time approached, a crowd of men gathered outside of the station. I judged them to be from the lumber camps, for they were rather a rough-looking group. While they waited they talked noisily and indulged in horse-play, punctuated by a very free use of profanity. One burly, overgrown youth seemed to possess a particularly rich vocabulary of “swear words,” and exhibited it with great gusto. Just when the noisiness had reached its climax, a neatly dressed, gentle-faced woman, who had been standing near me, stepped up to the men and handed several of them pieces of white paper which looked like handbills. Then she walked quietly away. The champion at profanity received a paper. “Svär icke!” (Swear not at all) was printed on it in staring black type. The voices of the men immediately dropped considerably, and after a few scattered remarks to one another, they separated. As the burly Swede walked away, he caught my eye and saw that I had been watching them and had noted what had taken place. Evidently mistaking me for a native, he came straight up to me.

“Say,” he asked, “did you see what that paper had on it?—Swear not at all!”

“Yes,” I replied, “I saw.”

He stared blankly at me for a moment or two as if he expected me to say something further, and then he moved off. This concrete method of teaching the second commandment seemed to have knocked the ground out from under his feet. I am not ready to conclude, however, that as a result of the lady’s missionary efforts he now is a candidate for membership in an anti-profanity society.

Presently the train for Söderhamn arrived, and I climbed aboard and journeyed toward the coast. The territory between Kilafors and Söderhamn is the heart of the lumbering region. Here I found the forests larger and denser, the streams filled with logs, and along the railroad tracks large piles of lumber covering many acres, awaiting transportation. We passed several saw-mills, near which were great mounds of bark and sawdust, saved for the sake of valuable by-products to be secured from them, such as charcoal, perfumes, and dyes.

Söderhamn has a population of several thousand, and is an important lumber-shipping harbor on the Gulf of Bothnia. My cousin Gunnar, whom I came to visit, is customs officer for the port. He lives half way up one of the pretty woodsy hills, in an orthodox Swedish house—dark red with white trimmings. As my Swedish kindred are mostly town dwellers, there is not much to say about them which would interest you, for they live very much as town dwellers do in all countries where the culture is of European origin. But there were a few things at Cousin Gunnar’s which got my special attention. One was the potted tomato plant growing in a sunny window of the dining room. It had several ripe tomatoes upon it, in which my cousin’s wife took such pride that she hesitated to gather them for the relish for which they were intended. When I reflected that the tomato vine was in the latitude of south Greenland, my respect for the small red fruit was profound. Another thing which impressed me was the courtier-like qualities of Swedish manners as illustrated by my cousins. Cousin Gunnar has six grown sons, some married, with homes of their own, and others still under the paternal roof. One or the other of these seven men seemed constantly to be just arriving or just departing, and always with bows numerous and profound. Before these replicas of Sir Walter Raleigh I felt myself to be a person of at least the importance of Queen Elizabeth.

Like Gefle and all other Swedish cities which I have visited, Söderhamn has clean, tree-shaded streets, handsome public buildings, and a beautiful city park. Whenever possible, the Swedish park is a hilly tract, rugged and woodsy. Such is the one at Söderhamn. And it was beautiful indeed when I saw it a few days ago. There were the dark old evergreens, dainty, silver-barked birches, rowan in abundance dotted with ripe red berries, and heather in purple bloom trailing over the gray rocks. On a high point of ground is a stone observation tower, built in the style of a castle and named Oskarsborg in honor of the late king. From this tower I had a fine view of the little city at our feet, and a panoramic sweep of the tiers of forested mountains, and of the gulf to the east. Siegfried, Cousin Gunnar’s son, who was with me, pointed out the elevation near the coast where, in the time of the wicked King Christian II, a Danish fort stood for the purpose of holding the Swedes in subjection. Christian II dominated even so far north as Söderhamn. Once, also, Siegfried told me, in Sweden’s old warring days, the Russians had sailed up the harbor and burned Söderhamn. May such a war-cursed time never again come near to the land of Sweden!

On the Train En Route to Falun.

P. S.—The above letter was supposed to be closed and ready for posting at my next stop; but I am adding this to tell about a funny man from whom I just parted company. He happened to be in the same compartment with me when the train left Söderhamn this morning, and when the conductor struggled to understand my bad Swedish, he kindly came to the rescue and answered my question in English. As the gentleman seemed quite mild and entirely harmless, I was glad of an excuse for conversation. Nearly twenty years ago, he told me, he spent several years in the United States as the secretary of a Swedish legation or consulate—I have forgotten which. His English pronunciation and grammar were remarkably good, but whole tracts of his vocabulary seemed to have dropped out of his memory. However, I supplied the words as needed, and we got on swimmingly for a time.

After he had given me much interesting information about the region through which we journeyed, I, wishing to say something particularly pleasant about his country, turned with my usual tact to the subject which had impressed me most wherever I had been in Scandinavia—the advanced position of the women. The gentleman acquiesced courteously in my view; and I, much encouraged, praised the Scandinavian men for their broad-minded attitude toward woman suffrage. Then I suddenly found that what I had taken for mildness in the Swede’s face was really conservatism. He promptly made it clear that he was opposed to the enfranchisement of women. I asked for his reasons, curious to know what a Swedish man’s objections would be like. In preparation for a crushing argument, he mobilized his English vocabulary.

“What is the word that goes with publicans?” he asked.

“Sinners,” I replied promptly, remembering my New Testament and wondering what was coming, “publicans and sinners.”

“Oh, yes, publicans and sinners,” said he. “Well, women are natural born sinners” (I gasped), “or socialists,” he added, “which is the same thing, and men are natural born publicans.”

“Democrats” was the word he had groped for—“democrats and republicans!” I explained that I had misunderstood, and supplied the proper words; and then the conservative gentleman proceeded to expound his theory—that woman suffrage would produce strife in the family, perhaps even divorce! Men folks are much alike the world over, after all, aren’t they? As are women folks. Other arguments were marshalled forth by both sides, but of course both of us remained of our original opinions; and the discussion ended by my quoting the retort of Mrs. Poyser in “Adam Bede”: “I’m not denying women are fools, God Almighty made ’em to match the men,” whereupon my opponent laughed and found another topic of conversation.

He was very gallant, however, and when I had to change trains at Storvik, where he did not, he insisted, at the peril of having his train depart without him, upon carrying all of my bundles into the waiting room for me, and upon obtaining detailed information regarding the train which I was to take for Falun. He was evidently used to the “clinging-vine” type of woman. I wonder how he supposed I reached Northern Sweden all alone.