Happy Times in Norway

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FINALLY ONE NIGHT CAME THE RAIN. FOR THREE SUC cessive days it streamed down, mild and still. "Mother," said Hans triumphantly, "I thought it was just something people said. But now I can hear it —the grass grow." Yes, the soft, sweet sound of falling rain that awakens the smell of earth and the first green blades of grass that arebreaking through the earth. . . . "Yes, it is true. Now we can hear the grass grow." The fourth day the sun came out and before evening all the birches were golden with tiny buds shaped like mouse ears. By next morning these buds had turned into tinyleavesand the trees stoodthere—green. Hans went with Mother when she went out to pick some of the first young birch leaves and white anemones for the Sunday dinner table. 85 2 HAPPY TIMES IN NORWAY "Mother, tell me the story you told me last year. About the pants-coat." "Dear me, have I told you that one? That was in a reader Aunt Signe had when shewaslittle." IT WAS ASTORY ahout a father who was explaining to his two little daughters, Kirsten and Else, the meaning of the Seventeenth of May. To illustrate, he reminded Else of the coat she had that was made out of an old pair of his pants. Else did not like this coat at all. It did not fit her, although Mother had done the best she could with material that had been cut originallyfor an entirely different purpose. All the children in the street shouted "the pants-coat, the pants-coat" whenever she wore it. And the daythat Else got a new spring coat which had been made just for her wasthe happiest day of her life. The union with Denmark had become a kind of pants-coat for Norway. It was so many hundreds of years agothat the two countries had united that people had almostforgotten how it happened in the first place. Queen Margrethe, mother of Olav Haakonsson, the last descendant of Norway's old royal family, was also the daughter of the King of Denmark. When her father died, Margrethe got the Danes to select her son Olav to be Denmark's king. Olav inherited the crown of 86 THE S E V E N T E E N T H OF MAY Norway from his father. But Olav died quite young. And so Queen Margrethe got both the Danes and the Norwegians to choose a little German prince, who was the sonof her niece, to be king of Norway and also king of Denmark. And after him came other German princes who had nothing more to do with Scandinavia than be descendants of Danish princesses who had married in Germany. And in ameasure these foreign kings united Norway and Denmark into one kingdom. But Norway soon became the stepchild in the union. It was a poorer land than Denmark, and so far-flung and difficult to rule—Norwegians were known to be headstrong and obstinate—that public officials and clergymen considered it almost like being banished to be sent to Norway. Finally, when the last king that ruled over the "twin kingdoms" lost a war with Sweden, he was forced to cede Norway to Sweden. But the Norwegians did not want to be ceded to anyone.They remembered their ancient right. Norway was not a part of Denmark, but an independent kingdom . It was the Danes who had chosen to unite themselves with Norway when they chose Norway's King Olav tobe their king also. And they knew every man in Norway had always had greater freedom than people had had in Denmark and Sweden. There the peasants were subjects of powerful proprietors and noblemen, 87 HAPPY TIMES IN N O R W A Y but in Norway the peasants had never been serfs. Even when they were renters and cotters, they had only to pay certain sums to the owner—they did not have to give him their services. He could not command them to become soldiers.The Norwegian armywasa people's army, and in the Danish-Norwegian fleet it was the Norwegians who had always made the best sailors and marines. The Norwegians did not want any Swedish pants-coat. They knew it would never fit them. Representatives from all over Norway gathered at Eidsvold to discuss how they could rescue our independence . While the Swedish army and the European...