Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/229

Rh is practised still more extensively on the more southern parts of Sweden, where the soil is less rocky still, and repays the toil of man. Both in Norway and Sweden the land belongs not to landlords but to farmers who live in their own domains and cultivate them. Small farmers own perhaps a hundred acres, or even less, while larger farms extend over three or four or five hundred acres, up to a thousand acres. The farmer pays the king's taxes, but no rent to any superior holder. He, of course, employs labourers to help him in cultivation, and these labourers are the poorest classes in Norway and Sweden. When they are young and unmarried, they generally let themselves out by the year, live in the farmer's house and take their meals there as members of the family, and get about 200 kronas (i.e., about £11 in English money) the year as wages. But when they get married they build little houses of their own, and often plant out plots of small land with potatoes, and eke out the produce of their land by letting themselves out, say, at 1 krona a day. The Swedes are a patient and hardworking but a poor race, and hence large members of them emigrate annually to America. In fact the largest number of emigrants that America receives are from Germany, Sweden and Ireland. Rye, oats, wheat and barley and potatoes are the principal produce here, as I have stated before; the sea swarms with cod and herring, and the land yields an inexhaustible supply of pine timber. Milk too is plentiful and there is a large export of butter to other countries of Europe. Iron is also largely exported.

About 1 we came to the picturesque lake Boren,