IN Norway people live in small houses in which the air is very bad. The people neither wash nor laugh, and common sense is unknown among them. Each man or woman is endowed with one idea, and that is sufficient for each. He is satisfied with it, and he is never seen without it. So that anyone may always very easily recognize the different characters of a Norwegian play. One knows that each idea is very significant, very logical, and very much to be noted. Thus, if a character has the idea of walking upstairs backward instead of forward, one feels perfectly satisfied about that person. He is always talking about his mania, and one knows that, in the end, some terrible and logical calamity is going to result from the perverse habit with which stepdame nature has endowed him. For all people in Norway are stepchildren of nature, and are barely endowed with sufficient complexity of intelligence to prevent them from swallowing poison, falling down wells, or walking over precipices. Indeed they do all these things, the moment the well or the poison or the precipice comes between themselves and their favorite hobby.
I saw a very nice play the other day about these people. If was about a very nice elderly man and his elderly sister, Jake Borg and Elisa Borg. Jake loved his sister, and his sister loved her cat—a Maltese cat of the largest variety. Both Jake and Elisa spent an hour or so each day in talking about the cat, and of how dangerous it was for the cat to insist upon walking on the back fence during the very hours when Jake was practising with his flint-lock at a target erected upon the fence. Jake, it appears, was a member of the village patriotic shooting society and was the president of it, and his whole heart and soul were wrapped up in it. The society used flint-locks rather than percussion caps because the time occupied by the explosion, being quite long with flint-locks, the nerves of the patriots would be the better steeled to bear the noise. Thus, during the forenoon, for several years, the devoted couple discussed the question whether or not the pet cat would be hit by the pet bullets; and it became alarmingly evident that such would be the case, unless one or the other of the afflicted persons should desist from the practice of his hobby. There were various other people who came in to help the principal characters in the play to discuss the peril. Neither party in the great conflict would budge from his principle—the one, for patriotic reasons, the other out of Christian piety and affection for dumb animals.
The anguish of the situation became so intense that it was almost a relief when the cat was shot by the heroic burgher in the very shot by which he completed a hundred consecutive bull’s-eyes—or would have completed them, but for the fated animal. Jake’s life was ruined by this failure; as Elisa’s was ruined by the loss of her companion, and the village life was ruined because there remained nothing to talk about thereafter. So, all the inhabitants of that Norwegian hamlet shut their windows tight, and continued each in the pursuit of his own serious hobby, neither washing, nor smiling, nor making allowance for the hobbies of the rest, but only grinding out remorsely the magnificent tragic material of Norwegian life.