Page:Mrs. Alec Tweedie - Through Finland in Carts (1897).pdf/19

2 creased in numbers as we went along—a young man here, a young girl there, an old man, or an old woman, joined us at different times, and, alas, left us again!

Having made charming friends in that far-away land, and picked their brains for information as diligently as the epicure does the back of a grouse for succulent morsels, we finallymy sister and Ijogged home again alone.

This looks bad in print! The reader will say, “Oh! how disagreeable they must have been, those two, that every one should have deserted them,” but this would be a mistake, for we flatter ourselves that we really are rather nice! and only “adverse circumstances” deprived us of our friends one by one.

It was on a brilliant sunny morning early in June 1896 that the trim little ship Urania steamed between the many islands round the coast to enter, after four and a half days’ passage from Hull, the port of Helsingfors. How many thousands of posts, growing apparently out of the sea, are to be met with round the shores of Finland? Millions, we might say; for not only the coast line, which is some 800 miles in length, but all the lakes and fjords through which steamers pass are marked out most carefully by wooden stakes, or near the large towns by stony banks and painted signs upon the rocks of the islands. Sometimes the skär (channels) are so dangerous that the little steamers have to proceed at half-speed, carefully threading their way in and out of the posts, as a drag at Hurlingham winds its course between barrels at the four-in-hand competitions.

Many places, we learnt, are highly dangerous to attempt at night, especially the Gulf of Bothnia, where the stakes are put down by Government boats in the spring after the ice has gone, and are taken up again in November before it forms, because for about seven months all sea traffic is impossible. Sometimes the channels are so narrow and shallow that the screw of the steamer has to be stopped, while the vessel glides through between the rocks, the