Petersburg, Stockholm seemed a southern vision,
and Sweden lured the tourist on. Through a cheerful New England
landscape and bright autumn, he rambled northwards till he found
himself at Trondhjem and discovered Norway. Education crowded
upon him in immense masses as he triangulated these vast surfaces
of history about which he had lectured and read for a life-time.
When the historian fully realizes his ignorance -- which
sometimes happens to Americans -- he becomes even more tiresome
to himself than to others, because his naivete is irrepressible.
Adams could not get over his astonishment, though he had preached
the Norse doctrine all his life against the stupid and
beer-swilling Saxon boors whom Freeman loved, and who, to the
despair of science, produced Shakespeare. Mere contact with
Norway started voyages of thought, and, under their illusions, he
took the mail steamer to the north, and on September 14, reached
Hammerfest.
Frivolous amusement was hardly what one saw, through the
equinoctial twilight, peering at the flying tourist, down the
deep fiords, from dim patches of snow, where the last Laps and
reindeer were watching the mail-steamer thread the intricate
channels outside, as their ancestors had watched the first Norse
fishermen learn them in the succession of time; but it was not
the Laps, or the snow, or the arctic gloom, that impressed the
tourist, so much as the lights of an electro-magnetic
civilization and the stupefying contrast with Russia, which more
and more insisted on taking the first place in historical
interest.
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