United States or Grenada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The peasants drink to get drunk, the better classes drink for excitement, and all drink because they like it. At the principal restaurants in Stockholm and Gottenburg there is usually an anteroom opening into the main saloon. Here every gentleman who enters deposits his hat and cane.

In the summer endeavours had been used to prevail on the King of Sweden to transport from Gottenburg the troops he had in that neighbourhood into Scotland or into the North of England. He had excused himself, not because he disliked the proposition, which, on the contrary, he thought agreeable to his interest, but for reasons of another kind.

In September Lord Cathcart delivered to the emperor a memoir from the British government, stating at length their reasons for declining any mediation in their contest with the United States. But, although the British government did not choose that a third power should interfere in this controversy, it had offered to treat directly with the American envoys at Gottenburg, or in London.

Clay informed him that, at the request of Lord Bathurst, the negotiation of the treaty of peace had been transferred to Ghent. Passing through Sweden, he embarked from Gottenburg in the United States corvette John Adams for the Texel, landed at the Helder, and proceeded through Holland to Ghent, where his associates met for the first time in his apartments on the 30th of June.

Here, as in Copenhagen, I noticed boys of ten to twelve years of age among the drummers, and in the bands of the military. The king remained this day and the next in Gottenburg, and continued his journey on the Tuesday. On the two evenings of his stay the windows in the town were ornamented with wreaths of fresh flowers, interspersed with lighted tapers.

A few birds wheeled about over it, or sat perched upon its rugged points, but with that exception I doubt if it furnished a foothold for a living creature. After a good breakfast of sausages and veal cutlets, brown bread and coffee, we again turned out on deck. This time the joyful tidings reached us from aloft that a Gottenburg steamer was approaching.

The next morning, at five o'clock, the steamer Viken, from Christiania, arrived, and we took passage for Copenhagen. After issuing from the Skärgaard, or rocky archipelago which protects the approach to Gottenburg from the sea, we made a direct course to Elsinore, down the Swedish coast, but too distant to observe more than its general outline.

It rained in torrents during the day we spent in Carlstad, and some lumber merchants of Gottenburg, who were on their way to Fryxendal, to superintend the getting down of their rafts, predicted that the deluge would last an entire month. There was always a month of rainy weather at this season they said, and we had better give up our proposed journey.

Whilst Grotius waited for Baron Oxenstiern's answer, he wrote to Spiringius, the Swedish Agent in Holland, asking him, in case he should not receive a favourable letter from Osnabrug, to send him a ship of war to some French port, on board of which he might embark for Gottenburg; or, if that could not be done, to obtain a passport to go from Holland to Gottenburg; but on condition that no mention should be made of what passed in his youth; otherwise, he declared, he would take another rout.

I visited several of these houses, as we had abundance of time for such excursions while the ship was going through the locks. I think one might walk the whole distance from Gottenburg to Stockholm in the same time that the ship takes for the journey. We lose some hours daily with the locks, and are obliged to lie still at night on their account.