Fretheim Hotel
Telegram. & Postadr.: FlaamFretheim i Sogn
Oslo, Norway, July 25.
Honey dear:-
It was good to find your letter here and also the one inclosing Me-iung Ting's. There was Woods Hole news from Charlotte, too. Four of my department girls sat down together one day, Mary Jane Walters, Helen Dyer, Charlotte and Madeleine Field, and several others who have been in our lab. are there, which is cheerful. Me-iung's letter I hope you read. It is sad to hear how China is suffering and also how that fine girl is over-working. I hoep she can get some relief when her good friend Dr. McLean is there. And she is looking forward so much to seeing Miss Purington.
I can tell you one thing and that is that Norway is just as rainy as England. It has been raining all day today and while Oslo seems to me no great show, still I can imagine seeing a good deal more in oime than we shall do. One can't really run around comfortably in a down pour. I hope to goodness it will clear off when we get farther south. Every day in Norway has rained, thought here have been clear spaces.
We reached Finse in a regular Mount Washington down-pour - wind, rain and cold. But the hotel was fine, even better than Mt. Wash. Our rooms were heated and we promptly washed! Always we wash! Also we ate good meals at that place, and when the rain let up a little I made two dashes along the lake - quite a big lake - to see the flowers. There wasn't a tree except the absolutely prostrate willows, one very decorative with red-brown fruit, about 1"-2" high. It was absolutely the most alpine place I've ever seen, snow at our level, unmelted ice in some of the lakes though by the hotel the water was free, great snow-fields and glaciers across the lake, showing occasionally. A German woman let me look thro' her tiny but powerful binoculars at the glacier, the nearest I got to it, blue ice and fissures. But the only glacier I really yearned for was Svartisen - and that we couldn't see for rain, the one above Trondhjem which comes down to the sea.
Yesterday it cleared very well for a part of the forenoon and I capered right up the nearby little mountain, maybe a thousand feet about Finse, which would give about 5000 feet. And never in my life have I had such an hour and a half of botanizing! They were all there, those little low things! I found 'em most every minute - between 40 and 50 kinds I had - and such absolutely alpine species. I sure did want Alma Stokey! Anne is no good at this - she stayed in except for a half hour and repacked her belongings. Folks certainly are interesting. I never saw anybody who could rearrange her things as many times, always with a perfectly good excuse. Well, I found that blessed Ranunculus glacialis white or pinkish, like a St. Brigid anemone, and it grew only on the very tip-top and was the only blossom in the sort of spongy muck which had been recently covered by snow. A few snow banks remained, not much on this mountain which faced south. There was a tiny yellow violet which you would have liked, there were those mossy things, not more than an inch and a half high, blossom and all, making round tufts sometimes. Oh, it was exciting, and incidentally the view and the air were wonderful, though it rained when I started and was raining when I got here in the evening, a little. But it did get clear for three hours and that was wonderful. I have pressed, very poorly of course, a few of the things to show Alma. Somebody had presented a few pressed things, named, to the hotel, and I found most of those, though I didn't strive for grasses &c, as she did. But her lot gave me about 20 names, and a few came, too, from the Abisko list. Abisko would have been just as good if there had been time to get higher up, but it was much more luxuriant near the hotel, with scrub birches still flourishing. I didn't see even a prostrate birch at Finse, only 3 or 4 willows. Oh, yes, gentiana nivalis appeared - very tiny and very blue, quite lovely. I think I found that one in the Tyrol, but possibly it was only the larger ones.
Finse is so easy of access, and in turn the heights are so easily reached from it - I want to go again! We came on to Oslo last night, a fine ride, though we couldn't get window seats.
The hotel here in Oslo is tacky, and the place all looks down at the heel, but there's some sort of a strike in progress which is said to be the cause. We've walked out by the Royal Palace in the rain, and fortunately the Viking ships are housed! They are easily the most interesting things we've seen. I'll give you the little books to read when I get home. I judge you may have seen one ship, but not the more beautiful one, from which so many wonderfully carved things were taken. The cart and sledges and some of the posts with animal heads are wonderful. 850 A.D. or so. The ships are in sheds, the smaller things in a remarkably interesting historical museum, which has many Norse things from the stone age on, and also Amundsen's arctic collections, very large. The kyacks and the fur clothes interested me much. The kyacks certainly are light - just poles with neatly sewed skins stretched over them.
Also I went to the Art Museum and looked at the local things, not at copies of Mona Lisa &c. There's a prevalence of storm pictures both sea and land, there are funerals and sick people, there's a severity in it all which is not hard to understand. There are few may-pole dances and such, and some smiling fjords, but mostly it's night in the interiors, with interesting lamplight effects, or lights from a house on snow outside and all that - absolutely different from some other groups of artists. Ibsen and Bjornsen appear at every turn!
We had what we wanted for dinner - a fine soup, with peas in, lobster with tartar sauce, wild strawberries & cram, the only little strawberries we've seen. Powerfully good.
Well - it's seven, and there's no chance of a clearing. I'm going to take a trolley ride and get a little lunch and then pack. We start early. Did I write you that Betsy Crofts' mother has an inoperable cancer? They're trying radium, but the result is very doubtful. She probably can't go back to Goucher though Miss King is holding the place for her, will give her 6 mos. or a year's leave.
We go to Malmö tomorrow and fly the next day to Amersterdam.
[unsigned but written by Abby Turner]