Through Finland in Carts Part 27

Grandpapa and I got into one, our student friend and my sister into the other, and away we went amid the kindly farewells of all the occupants of the hostelry, who seemed to think we were little short of mad to undertake a long tiring journey in native carts, and to elect to sleep at our haunted castle on an island, instead of in a proper hotel.

We survived our drive--nay more, we enjoyed it thoroughly, although so shaken we feared to lose every tooth in our heads. It was a lovely evening, and we munched wild strawberries by the way, which we bought for twopence in a birch-bark basket from a shoeless little urchin on the road. We had no spoon of course; but we had been long enough in Finland to know the correct way to eat wild strawberries was with a pin. The pin reminds us of p.r.i.c.ks, and p.r.i.c.ks somehow remind of soap, and soap reminds us of a little incident which may here be mentioned.

An old traveller never leaves home without a supply of soap; so, naturally, being _very_ old travellers, we started with many cakes among our treasured possessions. But in the interior of _Suomi_, quite suddenly, one of our travelling companions confided to us the fact that he had finished his soap, and could not get another piece. My sister's heart melted, and she gave away our last bit but one, our soap having likewise taken unto itself wings. He was overjoyed, for English soap is a much-appreciated luxury in all foreign lands. Some days went by and the solitary piece we had preserved grew beautifully less and less; but we hoped to get some more at each little village we came to. We did not like to confide our want to our friend, lest he should feel that he had deprived us of a luxury--we might say a necessity.

Every morning my sister grumbled that our soap was getting smaller and smaller, which indeed it was, while the chance of replacing it grew more and more remote. Her grief was so real, her distress so great, that I could not help laughing at her discomfiture, and, whenever possible, informed her that I was about to wash my hands for the sake of enjoying the last lather of our rapidly dwindling treasure. At last she became desperate.

"I don't care what it costs," she said; "I don't care how long it takes, but I am going out to get a piece of soap, if I die for it."

So out she went, and verily she was gone for hours. I began to think she had either "died for it," or got into difficulties with the language, or been locked up in a Finnish prison!

I was sitting writing my notes, when suddenly the door was thrown open, and my sister, her face aflame with heat and excitement, appeared with a large bright orange parcel under her arm.

"I've got it, I've got it," she exclaimed.

"Got what--the measles or scarlet fever?"

"Soap," she replied with a tragic air, waving the bright orange bag over her head.

"You don't mean to say that enormous parcel contains soap?"

"I do," she replied. "I never intend to be without soap again, and so I bought all I could get. At least," with a merry twinkle and in an undertone, she added, "I brought away as little as I could, after explaining to the man for half an hour I did not want the enormous quant.i.ty he wished to press upon me."

Dear readers, it was not beautiful pink scented soap, it was not made in Paris or London; heaven only knows the place of its birth; it gave forth no delicious perfume; it was neither green, nor yellow, nor pink, to look upon. It was a hideous brown brick made in Lapland, I should think, and so hard it had probably been frozen at the North Pole itself.

But that was not all; when we began to wash, this wondrous soap which had cost so much trouble to procure--such hours in its pursuit--was evidently some preparation for scrubbing floors and rough household utensils, for there was a sandy grit about it which made us clean, certainly, but only at the expense of parting with our skin.

My poor sister! Her comedy ended in tragedy.

CHAPTER XIII

THE LIFE OF A TREE

What different things are prized in different lands!

When walking round a beautiful park on an island in _Suomi_, the whole of which and a lovely mansion belonged to our host, he pointed with great pride to three oak trees, and said--

"Look at our oaks, are they not wonderful?"

We almost smiled. They were oaks, certainly, perhaps as big in circ.u.mference as a soup plate, which to an English mind was nothing; but the oak, called in Finnish _Jumalan Puu_, or G.o.d's tree, is a great rarity in _Suomi_, and much prized, whereas the splendid silver birches and glorious pines, which call forth such praise and admiration from strangers, count for nothing, in spite of the magnificent luxuriance of their growth.

The pine is one of the most majestic of all trees. It is so superbly stately--so unbending to the breeze. It raises its royal head aloft--soaring heavenwards, heedless of all around; while the silvery floating clouds gently kiss its lofty boughs, as they fleet rapidly hither and thither in their endless chase round this world. Deep and dark are the leaves, strong and unresisting; but even they have their tender points, and the young shoots are deliciously green and sweet scented. Look at its solid stem--so straight that every maiden pa.s.sing by sighs as she attempts to imitate its superb carriage, and those very stems are coloured by a wondrous pinky hue oft-times; so pink, in fact, we pause to wonder if it be painted by Nature's brush, or is merely a whim of sunset playing upon the st.u.r.dy bark.

Look beneath the pine; its dark and solid grandeur protects and fosters the tenderest of green carpets. See the moss of palest green, its long fronds appearing like ferns, or note those real ferns and coa.r.s.er bracken fighting the brambles for supremacy or trying to flout that little wild rose daring to a.s.sert its individuality.

Pines and silver birches flourish on all sides.

Everything or anything can apparently be made of birch bark in Finland--shoes, baskets, huge or small, salt bottles, flower vases--even an entire suit of clothing is hanging up in _Helsingfors_ Museum, manufactured from the bark of the silver birch.

The bark thus used, however, is often cut from the growing tree, but this requires to be carefully done so as not to destroy the sap. As one drives through the forests, one notices that many of the trees have dark-brown rings a foot or more wide round their trunks, showing where the bark has been stripped away. The ribband for plaiting is made, as a rule, about an inch wide, although narrower necessarily for fine work, and then it is plaited in and out, each article being made double, so that the s.h.i.+ny silvery surface may show on either side. Even baby children manipulate the birch bark, and one may pa.s.s a cl.u.s.ter of such small fry by the roadside, shoeless and stockingless, all busily plaiting baskets with their nimble little fingers. We often marvelled at their dexterity.

What were those packets of brown paper securely fixed to the top of long poles all over that field, we wondered?

"Why, sheets of birch bark," answered our friend, "put out to dry in the sun for the peasants to plait baskets and boxes, shoes and satchels, such as you have just seen; they peeled those trees before cutting them down."

On another of our drives we noticed bunches of dried leaves tied at the top of some of the wooden poles which support the strangely tumbledown looking wooden fences which are found everywhere in Finland, and serve not only as boundaries to fields but also to keep up the snow.

"What are those dead leaves?" we asked the lad who drove our _karra_.

"They are there to dry in the sun, for the sheep to eat in the winter,"

was his reply, with which we ought to have rested satisfied; but thinking that was not quite correct, as they were in patches round some fields and not in others, we asked the boy of the second springless vehicle the same question.

"Those," he said, "are put up to dry in the sun round the rye fields, and in the autumn, when the first frost comes and might destroy the whole crop in a single night, they are lighted, and the warmth and the wind from them protect the crops till they can be hastily gathered the next day."

This sounded much more probable, and subsequently proved perfectly correct. These sudden autumn frosts are the farmer's terror, for his crops being left out one day too long may mean ruin, and that he will have to mix birch bark or Iceland moss with his winter's bread to eke it out, poor soul!

The export of timber from Finland is really its chief trade.

+-----+------------------+--------------+----------------------+ Export of Wood, Wood Pulp. Paper, chiefly made Cubic Metres Kilograms. from Wood Pulp. (about 36 Cubic Kilograms. Feet). +-----+------------------+--------------+----------------------+ 1874 843,031 3,116,139 1,317,021 1884 1,229,008 9,326,288 8,464,841 1894 1,722,322 33,802,916 17,675,856 1895 2,704,126 35,548,000 .. 1896 2,136,888 39,096,000 .. +-----+------------------+--------------+----------------------+

In 1909, 5,073,513 cubic metres of wood were exported, and 192,373,500 kilograms of pulp and paper.

From this table it will be seen that a large quant.i.ty of pulp is exported, likewise a great deal of paper, and chiefly to our own country.

England exports to Finland somewhat, but very little, of her own produce, unfortunately; tea, coffee, sugar, and such foreign wares being trans.h.i.+pped from England and Germany--princ.i.p.ally from the latter to Finland. The foreign inland trade of _Suomi_ is chiefly in the hands of the Germans. "Made in Germany" is as often found on articles of commerce, as it is in England. Well done, Germany!

We gained some idea of the magnitude of the Finnish wood trade when pa.s.sing _Kotka_, a town in the Gulf of Finland, lying between _Helsingfors_ and _Wiborg_.

Immense stacks of sawn wood were piled up at _Kotka_, and in the bay lay at least a dozen large s.h.i.+ps and steamers, with barges lying on either side filling them with freight as quickly as possible for export to other lands.

The trees of Finland _are_ Finland. They are the gold mines of the country, the props of the people, the products of the earth; the money bags that feed most of its two million and a half of inhabitants. The life of a Finnish tree is worth retailing from the day of its birth until it forms the floor or walls of a prince's palace or a peasant's hut. To say that Finland is one huge forest is not true, for the lakes--of which there are five or six thousand--play an important part, and cover about one-sixth of the country, but these lakes, rivers, and waterways all take their share in the wood trade. Some of the lakes are really inland seas, and very rough seas too. Tradition says they are bottomless--anyway, many of them are of enormous depth. Tradition might well say the forests are boundless, for what is not water in Finland is one vast and wonderful expanse of wood.

Now let us look at the life of a tree. Like Topsy "it growed;" it was not planted by man. Those vast pine forests, extending for miles and miles, actual mines of wealth, are a mere veneer to granite rocks. That is the wonderful part of it all, granite is the basis, granite distinctly showing the progress of glaciers of a former period.

Such is the foundation, and above that a foot or two of soil, sometimes less, for the rocks themselves often appear through the slight covering; but yet out of this scant earth and stone the trees are multiplied.

Standing on the top of the tower of the old castle--alas! so hideously restored--at _Wiborg_, one can see for miles and miles nothing but lakes and trees, and as we lingered and wondered at the flatness of the land our attention was arrested by patches of smoke.

"Forest fires, one of the curses of the land," we learned. "In hot weather there are often awful fires; look, there are five to be seen from this tower at one moment, all doing much damage and causing great anxiety, because the resin in the pines makes them burn furiously."

"How do they put them out?" we asked.

"Every one is summoned from far and near; indeed, the people come themselves when they see smoke, and all hands set to work felling trees towards the fire in order to make an open s.p.a.ce round the flaming woods, or beating with long poles the dry burning ma.s.s which spreads the fire.

It is no light labour; sometimes miles of trenching have to be dug as the only means whereby a fire can be extinguished; all are willing to help, for, directly or indirectly, all are connected with the wood trade."