Tomsjoenaes, August 16, ’57.

My Dearest,—­I make use again of the Sunday quiet to give you a sign of life, though I do not know what day there will be a chance to send it out of this wilderness to the mail.  I rode about seventy miles without break, through the desolate forest, in order to reach here, and before me lie more than a hundred miles more before one gets to provinces of arable land.  Not a city, not a village, far and wide; only single settlers in wide huts, with a little barley and potatoes, who find rods of land to till, here and there between dead trees, pieces of rock, and bushes.  Picture to yourself about five hundred square miles of such desolate country as that around Viartlum, high heather, alternating with short grass and bog, and with birches, junipers pines, beeches, oaks, alders, here impenetrably thick, there thin and barren of foliage, the whole strewn with innumerable stones of all sizes up to that of a house, smelling of wild rosemary and rosin, at intervals wonderfully shaped lakes surrounded by woods and hills of the heath, then you have the land of Smaa, where I am just now.  Really, the land of my dreams, inaccessible to despatches, colleagues, and Reitzenstein, but unfortunately, to you as well.  I should like ever so much to have a hunting-castle on one of these quiet lakes and inhabit it for some months with all the dear ones whom I think of now as assembled in Reinfeld.  In winter, to be sure, it would not be endurable here, especially in the mud that all the rain would make.  Yesterday we turned out at about five, hunted, in burning heat, up-hill and down, through bush and fen, until eleven, and found absolutely nothing; walking in bogs and impenetrable juniper thickets, on large stones and timbers, is very fatiguing.  Then we slept in a hay-shed until two o’clock, drank lots of milk, and hunted again until sunset, bringing down twenty-five grouse and two mountain-hens.  I shot four of the former; Engel, to his great delight, one of the latter.  Then we dined in the hunting-lodge, a remarkable wooden building on a peninsula in the lake.  My sleeping-room and its three chairs, two tables, and bedstead are of no other color than that of the natural pine-boards, like the whole house, whose walls are made of these.  A sofa does not exist; bed very hard; but after such hardships as ours one does not need to be rocked to sleep.  From my window I see a blooming hill rise from the heath, on it birches rocking in the wind, and between them I see, in the lake mirror, pine-woods on the other side.  Near the house a camp has been put up for hunters, drivers, servants, and peasants, then the barricade of wagons, a little city of dogs, eighteen or twenty huts on both sides of a lane which they form; from each a throng looks out tired from yesterday’s hunt. * * *

Petersburg, April 4, ’59.