the beauty, youth, and fashion of Christiania resort. It
is sheltered on one side by a row of lime-trees, and, on the other, the
cool air from the waters of the Fiord struggles to refresh the languor
of a sultry evening.

In gangs of two and two, with drab slouch hat and jerkin, having one
side of a darker colour than the other, and reaching half way down the
body, the prisoners are led from their penal den, within this fortress,
to their appointed toil. There were many old men among these culprits;
and their great age rather sought and met with sympathy, than excited
detestation of the crime that had brought them to servitude; and,
perhaps, it would be a wiser enactment of the Norwegian Government to
forego the system of task-work thus publicly, and adopt some other
method of punishment less exposed to the popular eye; for, I believe,
the spectacle of an old man submitted to daily penal labour, and
burdened with clanking chains, is recognised by the public more with a
tendency to sympathise with his fate, than to condemn his crime.

While viewing the fortress, we were shown a large cannon, which was
captured, it is said, by the Norwegians from Charles XII. when he
besieged Christiania; but the real history of the cannon is, that it did
certainly belong to the Swedish army; but, Charles, as I have hinted
before, being obliged to raise the siege of Christiania to march with
his troops elsewhere, many field-pieces, as being too cumbersome to move
with celerity, were abandoned, and, among the number, this cannon was
left on the heights above Christiania. The Norwegians, when Charles and
his army had disappeared, scaled the summit of the hill; and, with much
laudable perseverance, succeeded in removing the huge piece of ordnance
to the fortress; and two sentinels ever keep guard over it, placed in a
conspicuous position over which the Norwegian ensign waves, and point it
out to the stranger as a trophy of the Norwegian army.

Contemplating, as we stood round the cannon, the broad expanse of the
Fiord, and the distant blue mountains dissolving with the sky, a low
building, like a powder magazine, arrested our attention; for numerous
sentinels moved rapidly in every quarter round it, and many brass guns,
ready primed, and bearing an earnest signification, flashed in the
bright beams of the morning sun. In this dungeon, from which Beelzebub
himself could not escape, it seems a notorious highwayman, called Ole,
is confined.