His next achievement was learning how to sleep in a Danish bed. The cot was so narrow, and so rounded in the middle, that if he forgot himself and fell asleep, the covers were sure to slide off one side or the other; and any effort to detain them resulted in his own downfall. Finally, he concluded to lie under the feather bed, instead of over it; and thus, braced by the wall on one side and two chairs on the other, and the huge tick settling down over him, he succeeded in wooing slumber. After two months devoted to business in Copenhagen, he took passage one autumn afternoon, in the steamship "Aarhus," for Christiania, where he was to join Dolores and her party. Passing through the "Kattegat," a severe wind rendered most of his companions seasick, and Percy was almost the only one who escaped the infliction. The next morning, one of the passengers asked the captain if the storm had been a severe one. For answer he simply pointed to the smoke-stack, which was encrusted to its very summit with the salt from the waves which had dashed over it in the night. Percy stopped at the beautiful city of Gottenburg for a day, and made a journey into the Northwest some fifty miles to visit the famous falls of Trollhatton, which are unsurpassed in all Europe. In a letter to his cousin that night he wrote as follows: "On the little cluster of houses, which constitute the village of Trollhatton, I was surprised to see in bold letters the name of a New York sewing-machine company. I had seen the sign in France and Germany, but I hardly expected to find it in this wild, unsettled portion of Sweden. The same day, in traversing the vast, dreary, rocky plateau which stretches from Lake Venern to the Skagerak, a large, freshly-painted sign of 'Fairbank Scales' met my eye. But in fact, where you find anything good over here in the way of machinery, you may be sure it is from America. "In all my travels through Germany I have never seen a reaper, a mower, or a steel plow. Most of the grain seemed to be cut with a sickle. In a very few instances I saw men using an awkward sort of cradle; but they always threw their swath _into_ the standing grain instead of away from it, and had women follow behind with sickles to pick it out and lay it in shape, so I did not see that they gained much. "It may be true that the American is somewhat given to bragging; but when he comes to see the clumsy old-fashioned way of doing things in Europe, and compares it with the methods at home, he begins to feel that he has a foundation for his boasting. The best fire-arms, the best cutlery, the best furniture, and the best tools, all come from America. Even American cheese has found its way all over Europe, and our various brands of tobacco are as familiar to the European smoker, as to the Yankee himself."