The stove in my room is of cast iron, and wood is the fuel. As it is now midsummer (July 6), we do not intend to use it, but it is a curiosity. It is four stories high, the lower one for the fuel, and the others are chambers to hold dishes for warming, and also to increase the surface for radiation of heat. We enjoy the sight of it, hoping that in the dreadful weather to come some of our successors may enjoy the heat thereof. This morning we took our first breakfast in Norway, and, according to our usual custom of giving you a bill of fare in each country, to let you know how we live in strange lands, I will just mention that we had for our simple repast coffee, cold lobster, beefsteak, ham, tongue, corned beef, fried sole, boiled salmon, herring, with bread, butter, cheese, strawberries, and all other things needed to make out a meal. The city has about fifty thousand people in it, and makes progress very slowly. It has a palace, which I positively did not visit, having made a resolution not to be tempted to go through any more, and a museum, which greatly entertained me for an hour or two. In these Scandinavian countries (meaning Sweden, Norway, and Denmark), they are very curious to discover and to preserve all remnants of the heathen worship of Odin which once prevailed, and this museum has some very precious relics of that dead past. A massive gold collar, and various ornaments, which were found buried in the earth, are very naturally referred to the days of idolatry, when they adorned a statue of Odin. And I am more and more convinced that to this day there is a lurking reverence among the ignorant peasantry for the deity of those old-time heroes, whom their fathers worshipped. So prone is human nature to superstition, and so hard is it to blot out of the popular mind and heart those ideas which, even in remote generations, got firm hold. Another very remarkable memorial of past times and customs treasured in the museum is the girdle and the knives which the gentlemen of Norway used in the good old days, now lost, when they _pitched into_ one another in duels. First, each one of the combatants took a butcher-knife (we call them bowie-knives now), and plunged it as deep as he could into a block of wood. The blade, so much as was not in the wood, was then wound round tight with strips of leather, and the knives were cautiously drawn out, and each man took his own. It therefore had now a longer or shorter point, according to the strength he had to plunge it into the wood. Their girdles were then fastened together, so that they could not get away from one another. Now they went at it hip and thigh, cut and slash, till one or both were killed. If modern duellists were put to such tests of strength and courage, there would be few challenges.