The most striking feature of Trondhjem to-day is that so large and thriving a town should be almost wholly of wood, even in the business section and including the vast palace of the king. In 1872 the city seemed to Du Chaillu (p. 223) singularly cheerless from the large sections that had been burnt and not rebuilt, while grass grew in many of the streets. Things are very different to-day. The thoroughfares are broad and straight, most of them pleasantly fringed with trees, and there is all the character of a prosperous, substantial town. A few wooden buildings are two centuries old, for instance the vane of the Raadhus is dated 1710 and that of the Hospitals Kirken[38] 1704, but these do not in the very least affect the general character of the place, and the aspect of the streets as a whole is as modern as well could be. The Cathedral quarter by a river bend seems to exhale a quite different atmosphere from the whole of the rest of the town. It is almost as though an English close had invaded an American city. Near the white square tower of the Frue Kirke (dated 1739) is a wide open space where on market-days stalls are erected and country and town deal directly with each other in those picturesque surroundings that are so largely the same all over the north of Europe. The harness of the horses looks primitive, and all the weight is on the shafts, but they race along like the wind, and when a destination is reached, the owner needs to do no more than to slip round the front foot of his beast a long strap attached to the carriage. Little of the Norwegian costume that is so attractive a feature of the fjord villages is to be seen in the city; the general life of towns is becoming distressingly the same all over the Western world. The atmosphere is, however, distinctly Norse by the quays, where the fish boats come in and large barrels of their catchings are rolled about, and also where high wooden warehouses, not entirely without picturesqueness, fringe the shores of the Nid and exhale a smell of fish and tar. The days of Danish supremacy are recalled on a hill just east of the Cathedral on the other side of the river by the picturesque old Fortress of Christiansten, which dates from the seventeenth century, and displays rubble stone walls surmounted by grassy slopes and penetrated by brick-vaulted passages and rooms. This period and this district of Norway were chosen by Victor Hugo when writing his first romance, _Han d'Islande_, which he published anonymously in 1823. The scene is, however, laid chiefly in Munkholm, a small rocky island which rises out of the waters of the fjord immediately opposite the town. In very earliest days of Christianity in Norway a Benedictine cloister was reared there, and for half a thousand years the monks remained, but little beyond the name survives to indicate their occupation to-day. Fortifications have long existed where the psalter was chanted in days of yore.