LITMIR.BIZ

      'Sweden's great king, Germany's deliverer, Gustavus Adolphus, caused Sala to be built. The small enclosed wood in the vicinity of the little town relates to us yet traditions of the youthful love of the hero king, of his rendezvous with Ebba Brahe. The silver shafts at Sala are the largest, the deepest and oldest in Sweden; they reach down a hundred and seventy fathoms, almost as deep as the Baltic. This is sufficient to awaken an interest in the little town; how does it look now? 'Sala,' says the guide book, 'lies in a valley, in a flat, and not very agreeable region.' And so it is truly; in that direction was nothing beautiful, and the highway led directly into the town, which has no character. It consists of a single long street with a knot and a pair of ends: the knot is the market; at the ends are two lanes which are attached to it. The long street – it may be called long in such a short town – was entirely empty. No one came out of the doors, no one looked out of the windows. It was with no small joy that I saw a man, at last, in a shop, in whose window hung a paper of pins, a red handkerchief, and two tea cans, a solitary, sedate apprentice, who leaned over the counter and looked out through the open house door. He certainly wrote that evening in his journal, if he kept one; 'To-day a traveller went through the town; the dear God may know him, I do not!' The apprentice's face appeared to me to say all that, and he had an honest face.

      'In the tavern in which I entered, the same deathlike stillness reigned as upon the street. The door was indeed closed, but in the interior of the house all the doors stood wide open; the house cock stood in the midst of the sitting room, and crowed in order to give information that there was some one in the house. As to the rest, the house was entirely picturesque; it had an open balcony looking out upon the court – upon the street would have been too lively. The old sign hung over the door and creaked in the wind; it sounded as if it were alive. I saw it from my window; I saw also how the grass had overgrown the pavement of the street. The sun shone clear, but as it shines in the sitting room of the solitary old bachelor and upon the balsam in the pot of the old maid, it was still as on a Scottish Sunday, and it was Tuesday! I felt myself drawn to study Young's 'Night Thoughts.'

      'I looked down from the balcony into the neighbor's court; no living being was to be seen, but children had played there; they had built a little garden out of perfectly dry twigs; these had been stuck into the soft earth and watered; the potsherd, which served as watering pot, lay there still; the twigs represented roses and geranium. It had been a splendid garden – ah yes! We great, grown-up men play just so, build us a garden with love's roses and friendship's geranium, we water it with our tears and our heart's blood – and yet they are and remain dry twigs without roots. That was a gloomy thought – I felt it, and in order to transform the dry twigs into a blossoming Aaron's-staff, I went out. I went out into the ends and into the long thread, that is to say, into the little lanes and into the great street, and here was more life, as I might have expected; a herd of cows met me, who were coming home, or going away, I know not – they had no leader. The apprentice was still standing behind the counter; he bowed over it and greeted; the stranger took off his hat in return; these were the events of this day in Sala. Pardon me, thou still town, which Gustavus Adolphus built, where his young heart glowed in its first love, and where the silver rests in the deep shafts without the town, in a flat and not very pleasant country. I knew no one in this town, no one conducted me about, and so I went with the cows, and reached the graveyard; the cows went on, I climbed over the fence, and found myself between the graves, where the green grass grew, and nearly all the tombstones lay with inscriptions blotted out; only here and there, 'Anno' was still legible – what further? And who rests here? Everything on the stone was effaced, as the earth life of the one who was now earth within the earth. What drama have ye dead ones played here in the still Sala? The setting sun threw its beams over the graves, no leaf stirred on the tree; all was still, deathly still, in the town of the silver mines, which for the remembrance of the traveller is only a frame about the apprentice, who bowed greeting over the counter.'