Next morning was the Midsummer Festival.  It was Sunday, the 24th of June, and a beautiful sunshiny day it was.  The most picturesque sight at the festival is to see the people from the different parishes coming in crowds, in large boats over Siljan’s lake, and landing on its shores.  We drove out to the landing-place, Barkedale, and before we got out of the town, we met whole troops coming from there, as well as from the mountains.

Close by the town of Lacksand, there is a row of low wooden shops on both sides of the way, which only get their interior light through the doorway.  They form a whole street, and serve as stables for the parishioners, but also—­and it was particularly the case that morning—­to go into and arrange their finery.  Almost all the shops or sheds were filled with peasant women, who were anxiously busy about their dresses, careful to get them into the right folds, and in the mean time peeped continually out of the door to see who came past.  The number of arriving church-goers increased; men, women, and children, old and young, even infants; for at the Midsummer festival no one stays at home to take care of them, and so of course they must come too—­all must go to church.

What a dazzling army of colours!  Fiery red and grass green aprons meet our gaze.  The dress of the women is a black skirt, red bodice, and white sleeves:  all of them had a psalm-book wrapped in the folded silk pocket-handkerchief.  The little girls were entirely in yellow, and with red aprons; the very least were in Turkish-yellow clothes.  The men were dressed in black coats, like our paletots, embroidered with red woollen cord; a red band with a tassel hung down from the large black hat; with dark knee breeches, and blue stockings, with red leather gaiters—­in short, there was a dazzling richness of colour, and that, too, on a bright sunny morning in the forest road.

This road led down a steep to the lake, which was smooth and blue.  Twelve or fourteen long boats, in form like gondolas, were already drawn up on the flat strand, which here is covered with large stones.  These stones served the persons who landed, as bridges; the boats were laid alongside them, and the people clambered up, and went and bore each other on land.  There certainly were at least a thousand persons on the strand; and far out on the lake, one could see ten or twelve boats more coming, some with sixteen oars, others with twenty, nay, even with four-and-twenty, rowed by men and women, and every boat decked out with green branches.  These, and the varied clothes, gave to the whole an appearance of something so festal, so fantastically rich, as one would hardly think the north possessed.  The boats came nearer, all crammed full of living freight; but they came silently, without noise or talking, and rowed up to the declivity of the forest.