CHAPTER XXV. WALKS ABOUT STOCKHOLM.

If you expect any very lively or striking pictures of Stockholm from a tourist like myself, whose besetting trouble in life is a constitutional melancholy, I am afraid you will be disappointed. It is beyond doubt one of the most agreeable cities in the North, and, so far as public institutions are concerned, affords a fine field of research for the antiquarian and the naturalist. Any enterprising gentleman who desires to improve his mind by the study of Puffendorf can here find the original. Linnus, Berzelius, and others will materially assist him in grasping at the mysteries of animated creation; and if he be of a poetical turn, he can enjoy Belman in the unadulterated Scandinavian metre. For me, however, the public museums and libraries possessed only an external interest. I would gladly have devoted the remainder of my life to Scandinavian researches, but, having several other important matters to attend to, I was reluctantly forced to give up the idea. The main object at present wa

I really had nothing particular to afflict me, yet I both felt and looked like a man sore acquaint with grief. Day after day I wandered about the streets in search of excitement. All in vain; such a luxury is unknown to strangers in Stockholm. I visited the fruit-markets, jostled about among the simple and kind-hearted peasants, bought bunches of cherries and baskets of raspberries from the pretty peasant-girls, and then stood eating my way into their acquaintance, while they laughed, and talked, and wondered where in the world such a strange man came from, and when I told them I came from California they looked incredulous, having probably never of such a country. Then I strolled down through the fish-market, where there were a great many queer fish exposed for sale by ancient and slimy old men and women, whose hands and aprons were covered with fish-scales, and whose faces had a very fishy ex

They offered me fish in every shape skinned, gutted, chopped up, or whole, just as I pleased to buy them. One wrinkled old woman, with a voice much broken by shouting against the