Most pressing were they all to induce me to stay some days with them, and gladly indeed would I have complied had circumstances permitted; but I felt compelled to hasten back to Hammerfest. In the afternoon, therefore, I bade adieu to a family which had shown me a degree of engaging kindness greater than any I had experienced since I left my warmly-attached Danish friends. The remainder of our return voyage was wet and tempestuous. We sailed and rowed all night, and reached Hammerfest at eight A.M. on July 5, much to the astonishment of the good folks there, who had not anticipated seeing us again in less than a week or ten days. The consul and many others assured me that my voyage had been performed with unprecedented speed, the whole time occupied being not quite three and a half days. A CONVERSATION IN A KENTUCKY STAGE COACH.[13] I can not refrain from giving a conversation which I heard as we came by the coach to Louisville. One of the speakers was a very agreeable and apparently well-informed gentleman, who seemed to have seen a great deal of the world. When he first entered the "stage," it would seem it was with the benignant intention of giving a sort of _converzatione_ in the coach, in which, after a few preliminary interrogatories to the various passengers (as if to take the size and measure of their capacities), he sustained all the active part, not calling upon them for the slightest exercise of their conversational powers. He varied the entertainment occasionally, by soliloquizing and monopolyguizing; and ever and anon it appeared as if he addressed the human race generally, or was speaking for posterity in a very elevated tone indeed, and seemingly oblivious of that fraction of the contemporaneous generation who were then largely benefiting by his really most animated and amusing discourse--for he was thoroughly original and very shrewd and entertaining. Where had he not been? What had he not seen? what not met, tried, suffered, sought, found, dared, done, won, lost, said? The last we could give the most implicit credence to, no matter how large the demand. Now he told us, or the ceiling of the coach, how he had been eighteen months in the prairies (which keep very open house for all visitors), shooting herds of buffaloes, and with his cloak for his only castle, and all his household furniture, and how he had been all this time without bed or bread: and he described the longing for the last, much in the way Mr. Ruxton does in his account of prairie excursions; and now--but I will not attempt to follow him in all his wondrous adventures.