kholm
to contest for the grand prizes against the crack skaters of Norway,
Denmark, Russia, and northern Germany.

But the national winter sport of all Scandinavia is skeeing--skimming
over the snow on snow-shoes. There is no more vigorous or exciting
exercise. In the country districts men and women alike are educated to
the use of snowshoes from childhood. As soon as boys and girls are
old enough to skate, they put on skees of a size appropriate to
their stature, and are quite as agile and daring as their elders. It
requires nerve, skill, and muscular strength to skee, and a person who
has never tried snow-shoes always finds it difficult to use them. It
is a sport to which people must be trained from childhood. A skilful
"skeer" can make a mile in two minutes.

Ice yachting and sailing on skates are two of the oldest and most
popular national sports, and are practiced in both Sweden and Norway
by all classes. All the ice yachts and snow-shoes are home-made, and
in the country districts many of the skates.[p]

CHAPTER XVII

THE NEWSPAPERS OF NORWAY AND SWEDEN

There are seven hundred and fifty-one newspapers and periodicals in
Sweden, including fifty-two dailies. Stockholm has twelve dailies,
seven published in the morning and five in the evening, which is a
large number for a city of three hundred and ten thousand inhabitants,
and the wonder is how they all manage to exist. None of them is as
large as the ordinary dailies in the United States. It is the practice
of the Swedish editors to waste very little room in headlines, and
to condense as much as possible. They state facts without padding or
comment, and manage to bring the daily allowance of news within ten
or twelve columns. There is usually a continued story, three or four
articles of a literary character, a couple of columns of clippings and
miscellany, and the same amount of editorial. The balance of the paper
is given up to advertising, but with all that it is seldom necessary
to print more than four pages. The morning papers stick to the blanket
sheet.

Most of the Stockholm papers have a good advertising patronage, which
runs to display at times. The Swedish business men have learned that
it pays to advertise. The rates are much lower than in the United
States. The ordinary want ad. costs from seven to ten cents, and for
display advertisements the rates run from two and one-half to twenty
cents a line, according to the location. In the semi-