At 10 p.m., in a bright daylight, the small boats full of passengers begin to leave the steamer for the shore.  In about fifteen minutes we are landed at the base of that towering Cape.  There are some who doubt the wisdom of Dr. Talmage’s attempting to climb at his age.  He has no doubts, however, and no one expresses them to him.  He is among the first to take the staff, handed to him as to all of us, and starts up at his usual brisk, striding gait.  It is a test of lungs and heart, of skill and nerve to climb the North Cape, and let no one attempt it who is unfitted for the task.  Steep almost as the side of a house, rocky as an unused pathway, it is a feat to accomplish.  We were the first party of the season to go up, and the paths had not been entirely cleared of snow, which was two and three feet deep in places, the path itself sometimes a narrow ledge over a precipice.  A rope guard was the only barrier between us and a slippery catastrophe.  Every ten or fifteen minutes we sat down to get our breath.  It took us two hours to reach the top.  It was a few minutes after midnight when the sun came out gloriously.

Coming down was much more perilous, but we got back in safety to the “Koeng Harald” at 2 a.m.  On our way down to Troendhjem we celebrated the Fourth of July on board.  The captain decorated the ship for the occasion and we all tried to sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” but we could not remember the words, much to our mutual surprise and finally we compromised by singing “America,” and, worst of all, “Yankee Doodle.”  Dr. Talmage made a very happy address, and we came into port finally, pledged to learn the words of “The Star Spangled Banner” before the year was up.

In our haste to reach the North Cape we had passed hurriedly through Sweden, so, on our return we went from Troendhjem to Stockholm, where we arrived on July 7, 1900.

When in London Dr. Talmage had accepted an invitation to preach in the largest church in Sweden, with some misgiving, because, as he himself said when asked to do this, “Shall I have an audience?” Of course the Doctor did not speak the Swedish language.  Dr. Talmage had been told in England that his name was known through all Sweden, which was a fact fully sustained by a publisher in Stockholm who came to the hotel one afternoon and brought copies of ten of the Doctor’s books translated into Swedish.  This insured a cordial greeting for the Doctor, but how was he to make himself understood?

The Immanuel Church in Stockholm, one of the largest I ever saw, with two galleries and three aisles, was filled to its capacity.  Dr. Talmage was to preach through an interpreter, himself a foremost preacher in his own country.  The Doctor had preached through interpreters three times in his life; once when a theological student addressing a congregation of American Indians, once in a church in Hawaii, and once in Ceylon through an interpreter standing on each side of him,