A WINTER'S DAY AT UPSALA. (Speaker.)

Otago Witness, Issue 2451, 6 March 1901, Page 63

A WINTER'S DAY AT UPSALA. (Speaker.)

Upsala, in the keen cold of a winter's day, with its white roofs facing the blue sky, is a cheerful place for the stranger amply clad. The reds and lemons and greens of its houses, and the rich purples of the countenances of its people, iovia <i charming bouquet of colour. The cathedral spires of red brick and the pale pink mass of th"c castle on its white hiU also | do their best to dispel the false tradition 1 of that brooding gloom which comes to the north when winter sets in to stiffen all t things, from the meat in the markets to the corpses which it is not then imperative to hurry to a grave. The students of Sweden's "nations" in their trim white caps, gaily rosetted, go arm-in-arm up the streets, in furs or otherwise, glancing only casually at the latest editions of Schopenhauer in the shop windows, much more prone to warble the part songs for which they are famous. Or they are to be met in the bright avenues round the base of the bulging pink castle, the trees thereof gorgeously decked as to their trunks with a thick embroidery of green and golden lichens. They are as comely a company of undergraduates as you will find in any of the world's university cities, and distinctly moi'e polite than the average, though it costs them barely £100 apiece to live through their pi escribed course, and go forth from Upsala with a degree. If you muddle your verbs and substantives in seeking a direction from one of them, he will not smile, but settle his pince-nez and with feeducing courtesy take you in h.ind academically. And having contented you, he will wish you "Godspeed" as tenderly as if you were his mother, and salute you with the respeci. due to his most distinguished professor. ThQ casUe slopes are excellent for the

toboggan, and, as every one knows, Swe*> den's King is not a man to interdict his people from the simple pleasures which may be enjoyed in the royal demesnes. When Ambassador Whitlocke came to Upsala on Cromwell's behalf, he found in Queen Christina a very different reigning sovereign from.' King Oscar. Iv was scarcely likely that a, Puritan of Puritans should live through many weeks of attachment to Christina's Court without some trials. He declined, on principle, to drink healths. "Why not eat a health?" was his retort to the shocked master of ceremonies at one of these royal banquets. But his bluff candour seems, on the whole, to have amused the young Queen. She made herself his valentine for one thing : item, £100 for a mirror to give her in acknowledgement of her condescension. Better still, she compelled him to teach her maids of honour "the English salutation." One would like to see that scene reproduced. It must have been much against the grain in a man like Whitlocke, with a loved and anxious wife at home, to set to work methodically and kiss and be kissed by these foreign yoang dames. That he was possibly thus fooled for the diversion of this Hyperborean court does not seem, from his narrative, to have entered his very demure and scrupulous head. In the seventeenth century, as in the twentieth, our Swedish cousins may be credited with as profound a knowledge of the natural instincts of gallantry as ourselves. The recollection of these incidents in and about the fat-towered pink castle of Upsala much adds to the Englishman's interest in it, apart from its exterior, which is as inviting, with five and twenty degrees of frost in the air, as a glowing brazier two or three fathoms in diameter. Upsala's castle is not much nowadays. save a fair crown to a green wooded hill covered a foot deep with snow in January and fringed with great parti-coloured icicles in its precipitouparts.