Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 December 1884 — A Sunday in Norway. [ARTICLE]

A Sunday in Norway.

Sunday came, and it was very pretty to see, on the evening before and in the early morning, the boats steaming up the fiord and down from tho inland lakes. One boat passed the yacht, rowed by ten young stalwart women, who handled their oars like Saltash fishwives. With a population so scattered, a single priest has two or more churches to attend to considerable distances, pastors being appointed according to the numbers of the flock, and not to the area which they occupy. Thus at Elversdale there was a regular serviee only on alternate Sundays, and this Sunday it was not Elversdale’s turn. But there was a Samling—a gathering for catechising and prayer—- ' at our bonder’s house, where the good man himself, or sgme itinerant minister, officiated. Several hundreds must have collected, the children in largest proportion. The Norse people are quiet, old-fashioned Lutherans,' who never read a newspaper, and have never heard of a doubt about the truth of what their fathers believed. When the meeting was over, bb many of them as were curious to see an English yacht and its occupants came on board. The owner welcomed the elders at the gangways "talked tcr dhenr inr their own tongue, and showed them over the ship. A had handfuls of sugar-plums for the little ones. They were plainfeatured for the most part, with fair hair and blue eyes—men in strong homespun broadcloth, the women in black serge, with a bright sash about the waist and a shawl over the shoulders, with bits of modest embroidery at the comers. They were’perfectly wellbehaved, rational, simple, and unselfconscious, a healthy race in mind and body whom it was pleasant to see, I could well understand what Americans mean when they say that, of all the colonists who migrate to them, the Norse are the best—and many go. Norway is as full as it can hold, and the young swarms who in old days rolled out in their pirate ships over France and England and Ireland, now pass peaceably to the far West.