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Holmen, hitherto a fast station, is now no longer so; and the same retrograde change is going on at other places along the road. The waiting at the tilsigelse stations is the great drawback to travelling by skyds in Norway. You must either wait two hours or pay fast prices, which the people are not legally entitled to ask.
You introduce towels and fresh water, and tea, and beefsteak, wherever you go, it is true; but you teach high prices, and swindling, and insolence likewise! A short distance beyond Holmen, the new road terminated, and we took the old track over steep spurs of the mountain, rising merely to descend and rise again.
The coast outside Merdö is exceptionally dangerous, but the Merdö pilots have also the reputation of being exceptionally brave and skilful. They are also perhaps the widest known. For having no defined district they take a wide range, and may to-day be lying off Lindesnaes, to-morrow under the Skaw or the Holmen, and the day after board a ship from Hamburg right away down at Horn's Reef.
I had at Moshuus a communicative little boy, who talked to me incessantly all the way to Holmen without ever discovering, so far as I could perceive, that I did not understand a single word he said. Another, after repeated efforts to draw me out, fell into a fit of moody silence, and from that into a profound slumber, which was only broken off toward the end of our journey by an accident.
Something awkward and uncouth stamps the country people of Norway. Honest and simple-minded they are said to be, and probably are; but of native refinement of feeling they can have little, unless all outward signs of character are false. We changed horses at Moshûûs, and drove up a level splendid road to Holmen, along the river-bank.
A little sleepy morning clock chimed over upon Holmen; here and there a door was opened, and a dog came out to howl; curtains were rolled up and windows were opened; the servant-girls went about in the houses, and did their cleaning by a naked light which stood and flickered; at a window in the palace sat a gilded lacquey and rubbed his nose in that early morning hour.
Signe Dahl sat in the little coupe of the railroad train which was carrying her to Christiania. She was the sole occupant of the compartment, her big valise resting on the opposite seat. Out through the lowered window she looked at the flying landscape, a mingling of pine hills, waters, and green meadows. An hour ago she had boarded the train at Holmen, the nearest station to Nordal.
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