ing, books, and writing and drawing materials. The collection of the requisite funds occupied some time. At length Mr. Taylor found himself in possession of "hundreds of bank notes, and thousands of silver pieces of all sizes, Swedish paper, silver, and copper; Norwegian notes and dollars; Danish marks, and Russian gold, roubles, and copecks." The delusion that he had all at once been showered upon by Fortune, was charmingly dissipated, how ever, in a very brief space of time. The vast pile melted away, like snow under the influence of a thaw.

When everything was arranged for the contemplated tour of two months, places were engaged in a diligence which ran to Gefle, 120 miles north of Stockholm. Mr. Taylor had previously taken lessons in the Swedish language, and hoped to be able to dispense with an Interpreter. They reached Gefle, a town of eight or ten thousand inhabitants and a considerable shipping interest, late on the third day. Here, the travelers found out, that thenceforth they were to proceed by "skjuts" (pronounced shoos) or post, taking new horses on each station on the road. Notice of their coming in the shape of what is called a forbud ticket, (or an order for fresh relays of horses,) was always to be sent on in advance. Mr. Taylor describes Gefle as a well built, pretty place, composed of houses mostly two stories high, white, and with spacious courts in the rear. It is surrounded with a low rolling country, covered with dark forests of fir, and pine. The weather, during our travelers' stay in this town, was superb-" gloriously clear, with a steady bracing south wind. Sunrise melting into sun-set without a noon-a long morning twilight-a low slant sun shining on the housetops for an hour or so, and the even

ing twilight at three in the afternoon." Nothing," Mr. Taylor adds, "seemed real in this strange, dying light-nothing-but my ignorance of Swedish whenever I tried to talk!"

At a reasonably early hour the next morning, accompanied by a rough two-wheeled baggage cart, and themselves ensconsed in another cart of precisely the same make, the travelers rattled out of Gefle in the frosty moonlight.

"Our road," the narrative goes on to say, "went northward, into dark forests. over the same undulating, yet monotonous country as before. As we drove station, three other travelers, who had into the post-house, at the end of the first the start of us, and consequently the first right to horses, drove away. I was dismayed to find that my förbud had not been received, but the ostler informed me that by paying twelve shillings extra I could have horses at once. While the new carts were getting ready, the postman, wrapped in wolf-skin, and with a face reddened by the wind, came up. and handed out my förbud ticket. Such was our first experience of förbud.

On the next station, the peasant who was ahead with our luggage, left the

main road and took a rough track through the woods. Presently we came to a large inlet of the Bothnian gulf, frozen solid from shore to shore, and upon this we boldly struck out. The ice was nearly a foot thick, and as solid as marble. So we drove for at least four miles, and finally came to land on the opposite side, near a saw-mill. At the next post-house we found our predecessors just setting off again in sleds; the landlord informed us that he had only received my förbud an hour previous, and, according to law was allowed three hours to get ready his second instalment of horses, the first being exhausted. There was no help for it we therefore comforted ourselves with breakfast. At one o'clock we set out again in low Norrland sleds, but there was little snow at first, and we were obliged to walk the first few miles. The station was a long one (twenty English miles,) and our horses not the most promising. Coming upon solid snow at last, we traveled rather more swiftly, but with more risk. The sleds, although so low, rest upon narrow runners, and the shafts are attached by a book, upon the sled sways from side to side, entirewhich they turn in all directions, so that ly independent of them. In going off the

main road to get a little more snow on a side track, I discovered this fact by overturning the sled, and pitching Braisted and myself out on our heads. Long af ter dark, we reached the next station, Strâtiära, and found our horses in readiness. We started again, by the gleam of a flashing aurora, going through for ests and fields in the uncertain light, blindly following our leader, Braisted and I driving by turns, and already much fatigued.

At Mo Myskie, which we reached at eight o'clock, our horses had been ready four hours, which gave us a dollar banco väntapenningar (waiting money) to pay. The landlord, a sturdy, jolly fellow, with grizzly hair and a prosperous abdomen,

asked if we were French, and I addressed him in that language. He answered in English on finding that we were Americans. On his saying that he had learned English in Tripoli, I addressed him in Arabic. His eyes flashed, he burst into a roaring laugh of the profoundest delight, and at once answered in the majestic gutturals of the Orient. "Allak akhbar !" he cried; "I have been waiting twenty years for some one to speak to me in Arabic, and you are the first!" He afterwards changed to Italian, which he spoke perfectly well, and preferred to any foreign language. We were detained half an hour by his delight, and went off forgetting to pay for a bottle of beer, the price of which I sent back by the skjutsbonde, or postillion.

This skjutsbonde was a stupid fellow, who took us a long, circuitous road, in

order to save time. We hurried along

in the darkness, constantly crying out "Kör på!" (Drive on!) and narrowly missing a hundred overturns. It was eleven at night before we reached the inn at Kungsgården, where, fortunately, the people were awake, and the pleasant old landlady soon had our horses ready. We had yet sixteen English miles to Bro, our lodging-place, where we should have arrived by eight o'clock. I hardly know how to describe the journey. We were half asleep, tired out, nearly frozen, (mercury below zero) and dashed along at haphazard, through vast dark forests, up hill and down, following the sleepy boy who drove ahead with our baggage. A dozen times the sled, swaying from side to side like a pendulum, tilted, hung in suspense a second, and then righted itself again. The boy fell back on the hay and slept, until Braisted, creeping up behind, startled him with terrific yells in his ears. After midnight the moon rose, and the cold was intenser than ever. The boy having fallen asleep again, the horse took advantage of it to run off at full speed, we following at the same rate, sometimes losing sight of him and

uncertain of our way, until, after a chase of a few miles, we found the boy getting his reins from under the runners. Finally after two in the morning we reached Bro."

From Bro, the travelers passed successively and by rapid journeying through Hudiksvall, Sundsvall, (where they purchased two light, but strong sleds,) Fjäl, a little hamlet gratefully embalmed in their recollection, because of its excellent Inn, and the delicious breakfast of beef steak and onions, blood puddings and tender pan cakes, equal in fragility to a Paris omelette soufflée, which they procured thereat.— Hernösand, the capital of an important province, Weda, situated on the largest stream in northern Sweden, until they arrived at Hôrnas in the vicinity of the frontier of Norrland. They found the temperature at this point 22° below zero, but the air was still dry and pleasant to inhale. Mr. Taylor confesses to the inconveniences of a paralysed nose, and a beard and moustache converted into a solid mass of ice, frozen together, so that he could hardly open his mouth, but the phenomenon appears to have given him not the slightest con

cern.

"By this time," he says, "it was almost wholly a journey by night, dawn and twilight, for full day there was none. The sun rose at ten and set at two. We skimmed along over the black, fir-clothed hills, and across the pleasant little valleys, in the long, gray, slowly-gathering daybreak: then, heavy snow-clouds hid half the brief day, and the long, long, dusky evening glow settled into night. The sleighing was superb, the snow pure as ivory, hard as marble, and beautifully crisp and smooth. Our sleds glided over it without effort, the runners making music as they flew. With every day the country grew wilder, blacker and more rugged, with no change in the general character of the scenery. In the afternoon we passed the frontier of Norrland, and entered the province of West Bothnia. There are fewer horses at the stations, as we go north, but also fewer travelers, and we were not often detained. Thus far, we had no difficulty:

my scanty stock of Swedish went a great way, and I began to understand with more facility, even the broad Norrland dialect.

"The people of this region are noble specimens of the physical man-tall, broad-shouldered, large-limbed, ruddy and powerful; and they are mated with women who, I venture to say, do not even suspect the existence of a nervous system. The natural consequences of such health are, morality and honesty -to say nothing of the quantities of rosy and robust children which bless every household. If health and virtue cannot secure happiness, nothing can, and these Norrlanders appear to be a thoroughly happy and contented race. We had occasional reason to complain of their slowness; but, then, why should they be fast? It is rather we who should moderate our speed. Braisted, however, did not accept such a philosophy. "Charles XII, was the boy to manage the Swedes," said he to me one day; "he always kept them in a hurry."

For many days the travelers continued to push northward, the country, although retaining the same general characteristics as at first, becoming wilder and more dreary still as they advanced.

They sojourned on Christmas eve at a station called Innertafle, and rose the next day to find the temperature 35 degrees below zero, "with which sign of our approach to the Arctic Circle we were," says Mr. Taylor, "delighted!"

After drinking a bowl hot milk flavored with cinnamon, the horses were ordered, and they left the station with the mercury (which had fallen) at 38 degrees. The cold soon began to play some grotesque pranks with them. Mr. Taylor's beard, moustache, cap, and fur collar, were speedily one undivided lump of ice. His eye lashes became snow-white, and heavy with frost, and it required constant motion to keep them from freezing together. Everything was through visors barred with ivory,

seen

"This," Mr. Taylor exclaims enthusiastically, "this was Arctic travel at last.

"By Odin! it was glorious! The smooth, firm road, crisp and pure as Alabaster, over which our sleigh runners talked with the rippling, musical murmur of summer brooks; the sparkling, breathless firmament; the gorgeous rosy flush of morning, slowly deepening until the orange disc of the sun cut the horizon; the golden blaze of the tops of the bronze firs; the glittering of the glassy birches; the long, dreary sweep of the landscape; the icy nectar of the perfect air; the tingling of the roused blood in every vein, all alert to guard the outposts of life against the besieging cold-it was superb! The natives themselves spoke of the cold as being unusually severe, and we congratulated ourselves all the more on our easy endurance of it. Had we judged only by our own sensations we should not have believed the temperature to be nearly so low.

The sun rose a little after ten, and I have never seen anything finer than the spectacle which we then saw for the first time, but which was afterwards almost daily repeated-the illumination of the forests and snow-fields in his level

orange beams, for even at midday he was not more than eight degrees above the horizon. The tops of the trees, only, were touched: still and solid as iron, and covered with sparkling frost-crystals, their trunks were changed to blazing gold, and their foliage to a fiery orangebrown. The delicate purple sprays of the birch, coated with ice, glittered like wands of topaz and amethyst, and the slopes of virgin snow, stretching towards the sun, shone with the fairest saffron gleams. There is nothing equal to this in the south-nothing so transcendently rich, dazzling, and glorious. Italian dawns and twilights cannot surpass those we saw every day, not, like the

former, fading rapidly into the ashen hues of dusk, but lingering for hour af ter hour with scarce a decrease of splen

der. Strange that Nature should repeat these lovely aërial effects in such widely different zones and seasons. I thought to find in the winter landscapes desolation-a wild, dark, dreary, monotof the far North a sublimity of death and ony of expression-but I had, in reality, the constant enjoyment of the rareest, the tenderest, the most enchanting

beauty.

The people one meets along the road harmonize with these unexpected impresmorning, straight and strong as the fir sions. They are clear-eyed and rosy as the

saplings in their forests, and simple, honest, and unsophisticated beyond any class of men I have ever seen. They are no milk sops either. Under the serenity of those blue eyes and smooth, fair faces, burns the old Berserker rage, no

On the evening of the day of our arrival at Mantanzas, we were visited by Mr. G., a gentleman to whom we had brought a letter of introduction. He was a man of high literary attainments and held an important position-being President of a College designed for the instruction of the Cuban youth. In addition to other attentions shown us during our stay, appreciated I trust, as they deserved to be, he did us the favor to give us letters of introduction to a friend, the proprietor of a sugar estate, which lay not far from the route of the railroad between Mantanzas and Havana. Accordingly, on our way back to the latter city, we stopped at the station house, not far from the engenio or sugar plantation, and forwarded our letter to the proprietor of the estate. This draft on the hospitality of utter strangers was promptly acknowledged, and the volante was soon at the station house, with an invitation for us to proceed to the dwelling of the proprietor. Alighting at the portico, we were introduced to the inmates, Signor and Signora P. and Signor A., and then conducted into the hall. On the right on entering, was a billiard table, in a room appropriated to that purpose; on the left, the dining room; and directly in front, the open gallery from which you enter the sleeping apartments. The house was a quadrangle of one story, with lofty ceilings, built round an open court. The windows were down to the floor; that from the billiard room looked out upon an orchard; that from the dining room, upon a flower garden. In front,

was a portico supported by columns. The portico was paved with brick.

Just fifty yards in front of the dwelling house, is the sugar manu-` factory, with the steam engine attached. The cane was now being cut in the fields, and carted home by oxen; which, as they were fed on the leaves and top joints of the cane, were in excellent condition. The cut cane was thrown from the carts near the apparatus, for grinding, and was then laid upon a sort of revolving frame work, which fed it to the rollers. These were three in number, of cast iron, and the cane was so completely crushed in passing through, that scarce a drop of fluid remained in the rind. It is taken up as it leaves the rollers, by young or by invalid negroes, and spread so as to dry in the sun, and serve for fuel; not however for the engine, which requires wood or coal, but for the stoves, which have flues passing beneath the floors of what may be called the drying house. The juice, meanwhile, as it passes from the rollers, is received into a vat, from which it is conducted by a pipe, into the first boiler, and then is ladled out by the attendants into another, and another, until it reaches the point proper for granulation, when it is poured into vessels of tile, in shape like the frustrum of a cone, and set to drain.-— Then it is clayed, that is, purged or purified, by being covered with a layer of mud, which by courtesy is called clay. The effect of this claying is to precipitate the molasses, and clarify the portion which is in contact with the clay: and the