At Freidericksvern we landed a large number of our passengers. This is a naval station, and the residence of officers with their families. The hills about the picturesque town are attractive to the mineralogist, and the “crystals of shining feldspar are seen at a distance.” I did not see them. Entering a bay, and keeping near to the rock-bound coast, we steamed up a river for several hours, touched at Moss, crossed over to Hosten, a great naval station, and found a host of people on the wharf, to wait the steamer’s arrival. Here the fiord, or bay, divides into two, one leading to Dremmen, and the other, which we pursue, to CHRISTIANIA, the capital of Norway. The mountains on the left are bold; sometimes lofty perpendicular rocks rise from the water. The sight is striking, grand indeed. Night approaches, but not darkness. It is nine, ten, eleven o’clock, and still the daylight lingers. At midnight we arrived at our destined port. We have been steaming almost due north twenty hours. Our baggage must be searched, for Norway has its own customs, though under the same crown with Sweden. But the search was slight and soon over. Perhaps you will be as much surprised to hear as I was to see that the city of Christiania is so much like other cities; if I had awoke out of sleep and found myself in it, I would not have supposed myself in the northernmost kingdom of Europe, and on the confines of the frozen zone. It has indeed a frigid look, a barrenness of ornament, a precise, severe, and perfectly plain style of building, if that may be called a style which is no style at all. But there is nothing about it to excite observation, except it be that it is more of a city, with greater attractions in objects of interest to visit, than one would look for in Norway. The house at which I am stopping, Hotel du Nord, has rooms for two hundred guests; it is a hollow square, with a balcony on the four sides of the quadrangular court within, and each room on the balcony has a door opening upon it. On the piazza of the central building is a platform covered with awning, and surrounded with shrubs and flowers, with a fountain of water playing in the midst. I find in these hyperborean regions the people take pains to adorn their houses with plants and blooming flowers, to cheat themselves with the pleasing delusion that they are just as well off as those who dwell in more genial climes. This is true of the dwellers in the cities, and in the rural villages also, where I have noticed that windows are filled with plants exposed to the sun and the passer’s eye.