We've so many things altogether. I am a stranger here myself--as indeed I am everywhere--yet I could reckon up a host of things we have besides the river. Was the town a big place once upon a time? No, it has been a little town for two hundred and fifty years. But there was once a great man over all the smaller folk--one who rode lordly fashion with a servant behind him--a great landowner. Now we are all equal; saving, perhaps, with Engineer Lassen, this something-and-twenty-year-old Inspector of rafting sections, who can afford two rooms at his hotel. I have nothing to do, and find myself pondering over the following matter: Here is a big house, somewhere about a couple of hundred years old, the house of the wealthy Ole Olsen Ture. It is of enormous size, a house of two stories, the length of a whole block; it is used as a depot now. In the days when that house was built there was no lack of giant timber hereabouts; three beams together make the height of a man, and the wood is hard as iron; nothing can bite on it. And inside the building are halls and cells as in a castle. Here Ture the Great ruled like a prince in his day. But times changed. Houses were made not only big, not only to live in for shelter from cold and rain, but also to look on with pleasure to the eye. On the opposite side of the river stands an old archaic building with carefully balanced verandah in the Empire style, pillars, fronton, and all. It is not faultless, but handsome all the same; it stands out like a white temple on the green hillside. One other house I have seen and stopped to look at; one near the market-place. Its double street door has old handles and carved rococo mirrors, but the frames cannelated in the style of Louis XVI. The cartouche above the doorway bears the date 1795 in Arabic numerals--that was our transition period here! So there were folk here at that time who kept in touch with the times, without the aid of steam and telegraph. But later on, again, houses were built to keep off rain and snow and nothing else. They were neither big nor beautiful to look at. The idea was to put up some sort of a dwelling, Swiss fashion--a place to keep a wife and children in, and that was all. And we learned from a miserable little people up in the Alps, a people that throughout its history has never been or done anything worth speaking of--we learned to pay no heed to what a homestead really looked like, as long as it met with the approval of loafing tourist. Is there something of the calm and beauty of a temple about that white building on the hillside? And pray, what's the use of it if there is? And the great big house that dates from the time of Ole Olsen Ture, why hasn't it been pulled down long ago? There would be room for a score of cheap dwellings on the site. Things have gone downhill, gone to the depths. And now the little cobbler-soul can rejoice--not because we're all grown equally great, but because we're all equally small. 'Tis our affair!