When morning broke we were speeding along towards Stockholm.  The country was very different from Denmark, much wilder, with rocks and trees and sand and an occasional glimpse of lake.  At that time Sweden was supposed to bear little good-will towards England, and certainly our reception in that land was distinctly a chilly one.  We drove on arrival to a hotel which had been recommended to us and asked the concierge if there were rooms.  He said there were, so we had our luggage taken down and dismissed the cab.  The concierge then looked at us suspiciously, and said, “You are English?” “Yes, we are English.”  He then went and confabbed for some minutes with the manageress, and returned.  “There are people still in the rooms, they will not be ready for twenty minutes.”  “Then we will have breakfast now and go to our rooms after.”  Another long conversation with the manageress, and then he returned again.  “There are no rooms.”  “But you said there were rooms.”  “There are no rooms.”  Evidently there were none for English travellers anyway, so we went to another hotel opposite the station, where they were civil, but no more.  We had to stay in Stockholm twenty-four hours and simply hated it.  I had heard much of this “Venice of the North,” but the physical atmosphere was as chilly and unfriendly as the mental one.

The recollection stamped on my memory is of a grey, cheerless town where it rained hard almost the whole time, and a bitter wind blowing over the quays which moaned and sobbed like a lost banshee.

I was asked to luncheon at the British Legation, and this proved a very fortunate occurrence for us all, as the minister was so kind as to go to great trouble in getting us a special permit from the Swedish Foreign Office to sleep at Boden.  Boden is a fortified frontier town and no foreigners are, as a rule, allowed to stay the night there, but have to go on to Lulea, and return to Boden the next morning.  We started off on the next lap of our northern journey that evening, and again through the minister’s kind intervention were lucky in getting a carriage to ourselves in a very full train, and arrived twenty-four hours later at Boden.

It was extraordinarily interesting to sleep in that little shanty at Boden, partly, no doubt, because it was not ordinarily allowed.  The forbidden has always charms.  It was the most glorious starlight night I have ever seen, but bitterly cold, with the thermometer ten degrees below zero, and everything sparkling with hoar frost.  It was here we nearly lost a bishop.  A rather pompous Anglican bishop had been travelling in the same train from Stockholm, and hearing that we insignificant females had been permitted to sleep at Boden, he did not see why he should not do the same and save himself the tiresome journey to Lulea and back.  So in spite of all remonstrances he insisted on alighting at Boden, and with the whole force of his ecclesiastical authority announced his intention of staying there.  However, it was not allowed after all, and he missed the train, and while we were comfortably having our supper in the little inn, we saw the poor bishop and his chaplain being driven off to Lulea.  They turned up again next morning, but so late that we were afraid they had got lost on the way the night before.