healthful and exhilarating odor.

Can one imagine a more charming _posada_ in Italy, or a more seductive
_fonda_ in Spain? No. And the crowd of English tourists have not yet
raised the scale of prices as in Switzerland--at least, they had not
at the time of which I write. In Dal, the current coin is not the
pound sterling, the sovereign of which the travelers' purse is
soon emptied. It is a silver coin, worth about five francs, and its
subdivisions are the mark, equal in value to about a franc, and the
skilling, which must not be confounded with the English shilling, as
it is only equivalent to a French _sou_.

Nor will the tourist have any opportunity to use or abuse the
pretentious bank-note in the Telemark. One-mark notes are white;
five-mark notes are blue; ten-mark notes are yellow; fifty-mark notes,
green; one hundred mark notes, red. Two more, and we should have all
the colors of the rainbow.

Besides--and this is a point of very considerable importance--the
food one obtains at the Dal inn is excellent; a very unusual thing
at houses of public entertainment in this locality, for the Telemark
deserves only too well its surname of the Buttermilk Country. At
Tiness, Listhus, Tinoset, and many other places, no bread is to be
had, or if there be, it is of such poor quality as to be uneatable.
One finds there only an oaten cake, known as _flat brod_, dry, black,
and hard as pasteboard, or a coarse loaf composed of a mixture of
birch-bark, lichens, and chopped straw. Eggs are a luxury, and a most
stale and unprofitable one; but there is any quantity of poor beer to
be had, a profusion of buttermilk, either sweet or sour, and sometimes
a little coffee, so thick and muddy that it is much more like