In the course of my northern excursion, it was generally my fate, when we passed a night in a town, to have a ball or a public coffeeroom for my chamber, which, on account of their size, are generally the most comfortless apartments that a man can attempt to close his eyes in. At Abo, my bed was made up in an appendage to the ball-room, and had much of Finnish decoration to recommend it. The walls were laboriously painted in glowing colours, with flaming swords, fiddles, and flutes, and seraphim's heads, which were saved from the voracious and expanded beaks of griffins, by the tender interposition of baskets of flowers, and over the whole there was a pretty sprinkling of sphinxes and the royal arms of Sweden. Here we provided ourselves with a stock of provisions for our journey, and early the morning after our arrival bade adieu to Abo. The regulation of the post and the coin are the same here as in the other parts of Sweden.

As we proceeded the face of the country began to undulate; we observed that the houses were constructed of fir trees rudely squared by the axe, and laid, with a little moss between, upon each other, the ends of which, instead of being cut off, are generally left projecting beyond the sides of the building, and have a most savage and slovenly appearance. The roof is also of fir, sometimes stained red; the windows are frequently cut with the axe after the sides of the houses are raised. Such of these as were well finished had a good appearance, and are very warm and comfortable within. Our servant, who was well acquainted with the Swedish language, began to find himself, every mile we advanced, more and more puzzled. The patois of this province is a barbarous and unintelligible mixture of Swedish and Russ. The summer, now the eleventh of July, burst upon us with fiery fury, with no other precursors than grass and green leaves, On a sudden the flies, which experience a longer date of existence in the north than in the milder regions of Europe, on account of the stoves used in the former, awoke from the torpor in which they had remained, between the discontinuance of artificial warmth and the decisive arrival of the hot weather, and annoyed us beyond imagination. They are the musquitoes and plague of the north. No one, but those who have suffered, could believe them capable of producing so much torment.

One night we put up at Mjolbollsted, a solitary post-house, in the midst of a gloomy forest of fir, which lay upon the borders of an arm

of the gulf of Finland. The post-master ushered us into a little hole in a wooden shed, opposite to the post-house, the latter being occupied by his family. We had the consolation of finding that we had the place to ourselves, from which we could never have expected to emerge, if, notwithstanding the treachery of our vorbode some time before, we had not formed an high opinion of Swedish morality. The windows which looked into the depth of the forest, were as immoveable as the building; this was somewhat satisfactory. It is always a pleasant thing to strengthen favourable impressions with judicious precautions. The sides of the room were completely encrusted with flies, who at this moment were recruiting themselves for the mischief of the next day; and mice and tarrakans, or beetles, shared the possession of the floor. In two corners of this dolorous hole stood two cribs, each furnished with a bed of straw, a bronze-coloured blanket well charged with fleas, and a greasy coverlid. Cribs are the usual bedsteads in the north. Here we endeavoured to invoke that sweet power which

Alas! our wretched taper, and the bustle of bringing in our luggage, had excited an alarm amongst our tormentors, who besieged us in battalions. These busy many-eyed marauders, with their gossamer wing and incessant hum, opposed the approach of sleep, and fairly kept her aloof for two long dreary hours. Weary, yet incapable of repose, something was to be done. I resolved upon revenge, and accordingly made an irritable effort to surprise three of my enemies, who in a row were audaciously washing their little slender black hands upon one of mine; I gained nothing by my rage but (such is the association of ideas) the recollection of an admirable representation, which I once saw in a private room, of an ideot attempting to do the same thing, and the wild delight which he displayed in succeeding, by a gentleman who, closely and chastely copying nature, the only model capable of making any actor great, may be ranked amongst the first comedians of his time, I mean Mr. Matthews.

The impression of that surprising display of imitative power so completely occupied me, that, in spite of my opponents, I succeeded in closing my eye-lids, and never opened them until the full day

broke in great glory. Upon rising I found some brother travellers, who arrived after we had retired to rest, had slept on the earth under their carriage, and were in the act of shaking themselves and setting off for Abo. I must confess, agreeable as solitude frequently is to me, I was glad to retire from this species of it. As the sultry sun was flaming in the meridian, we passed a large portion of a forest on fire. This circumstance was not the effect of accident nor of a natural cause, which in these regions is frequently followed by the most direful consequences, and to which I shall have occasion to allude hereafter. By some smart touches of the whip we saved our servant, horses and carriage from being a little toasted on one side. What we saw arose from the farmers clearing the ground, who confine the flames to the proper boundary by making an interval of felled trees. In the evening we passed by, at some distance, another forest which was in the same predicament, and had a very sublime and novel effect.

The country about Borgo, a garrison town most miserably paved, and where our passports were demanded, is undulating and fertile, but the cottages in that part of Swedish Finland are very miserable, and the peasantry wretchedly clothed. The men, the women, and the children, had no other covering than ragged shirts; although the sun was too intense to induce any one to pity them on account of their exposure to the weather, yet their appearance was that of extreme penury. The roads were still excellent, and enabled us to proceed with our accustomed velocity. The time did not admit of our attempting to see the celebrated Swedish fortress of Sveaborg, which occupies seven islands in the gulf of Finland, and is capable of protecting the fleets of Sweder against the Russians. The batteries, basons, and docks, are of hewn granite, and said to be stupendous. I was reconciled afterwards to my not having attempted to see this place, as I found some English travellers, of great respectability, were about this time refused permission to view it, and that too with some degree of rudeness.

About three miles from Louisa, another garrison town, we reached the frontier of Sweden, and in a custom and guard house beheld the last remains of that country. A Swedish soldier raised the cross bar, such as I described in Denmark; we passed over a bridge which crosses a branch of the river Kymen, and divides Sweden from Russia. The exclusive right of painting this little bridge had very nearly

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inflamed these rival nations to the renewal of all those horrors which have so long and so prodigally wasted the blood and treasure of both countries. It has been contended, that aggregate bodies of men are governed by other rules of conduct than those which ordinarily influence mere individuals: for my part I regard a nation only as a man magnified, constantly displaying all the anger, inveteracy, caprice, and petulance of the solitary being. This marvellous dispute, after a stormy discussion, with the sword half-drawn, was settled in the following manner, viz. Sweden was to use what sized brush and what colours she preferred, upon one half of the bridge, and on the other Russia the like materials in the way that best suited her fancy; but it is useless to talk about a few piles and planks; they were the ostensible, but the real cause of the difference was, and ever will be, the vicinity of the countries, for, unhappily! nations are more disposed to mutual attachment, if they cannot see each other.

Russia has exercised the privilege of her brush with a vengeance, not only upon her half of this said bridge, but upon all her public buildings, which she has distinguished by a maghye colour. This predilection is said to have arisen from the result of the late unfortunate emperor's reflections upon mankind, whom he arranged under two classes, the good and the bad, thinking no doubt with the Spanish proverb, that heaven will be filled with those who have done good actions, and hell with those who intended to do them, and accordingly he ordered the fronts of all public railings, offices, &c. to be striped with white and black. Sancho Pança, a man of no little wit and sagacity, thought life susceptible of being represented by an intermediate colour; upon returning from an important commission, he was asked by his master, whether he should mark the day with a black or a white stone. "Faith, sir,” replied his trusty servant, "if 66 you will be ruled by me, with neither, but with good brown ochre," the colour best suited to describe it. I heard another reason assigned for this magpye appearance when I reached the capital.

A new race of beings, in green uniform, stout, whiskered, and sunbrowned, raised the bar of the barrier on the other side of the bilge, stopped the carriage, and conducted us to the guard-house, a square wooden building, with a projecting roof, resting upon little pillars of wood, under the shade of which several soldiers were sleeping. This building was of course embellished after the fashion of the bridge, and had a most frightful appearance: we were ushered into a small shabby room, in the windows were some flower pots, and

upon an old table the poems of Ossian in French, open, and by their side a vast snuff-box and most filthy handkerchief; presently a little old Russian major entered, in a white linen dressing-gown, and in French demanded our passports, with which he was satisfied, and immediately made out our order for post-horses, without which no one can travel in Russia, called a podoragina; upon presenting the paper to us, he demanded six rubles and forty copecs, which he informed us constituted a part of the revenues of his imperial majesty; we told him that we had no Russian money whatever, but offered to pay him in Swedish rix dollar notes: "If you have any of them,” said he, "I must seize them," and went into another room; but he uttered this without severity: perhaps the consideration that he was speaking to a couple of Englishmen softened his tone and look. In a moment we found ourselves like two ill-starred mice, who unexpectedly find themselves within the basilisk beam of a cat's eye.

Our station from the last post-house in Sweden, extended to the seventh verst post in Russian Finland, and we never entertained an idea that any law so pregnant with inconvenience existed in Russia, for making Swedish money found within its barrier forfeitable, more especially as there is no bank upon the confines of either country. The major presently returned with a pile of notes, exclaiming, "See what a quantity I seized a few days since from a Danish gen"tleman!" We endeavoured to give a turn to the conversation, in which his urbanity assisted, and at length we paid him in Dutch ducats, one proof at least of the safety and convenience of this valuable coin. Before we parted, we observed that he entered our names in a register as arrivals on the second of July: at first we were surprised, for, according to my journal, it was the fourteenth; but a moment's recollection informed us that we were in a country in which the Julian calendar, with the old style, obtains, before which our calculation always precedes, by an advanced march of twelve days. Both old and new style are superior to the poetical absurdity of the French calendar, which must be at perpetual variance with the immutable law of climates and geography: for instance, when a merchant is melting away under the fiery sun of the French West India islands, his correspondence will be dated Nivose, or the month of snow.

After making our bows to the little major, and secretly wishing, for his civility, in the language of his favourite author, that he might be "the stolen sigh of the soul" of some fair Finn girl, and that