In Dal, the current coin is not the pound sterling, the sovereign of which the travelers' purse is soon emptied.

It is a silver coin, worth about five francs, and its subdivisions are the mark, equal in value to about a franc, and the skilling, which must not be confounded with the English shilling, as it is only equivalent to a French _sou_.
Nor will the tourist have any opportunity to use or abuse the pretentious bank-note in the Telemark.

One-mark notes are white; five-mark notes are blue; ten-mark notes are yellow; fifty-mark notes, green; one hundred mark notes, red.

Two more, and we should have all the colors of the rainbow.
Besides--and this is a point of very considerable importance--the food one obtains at the Dal inn is excellent; a very unusual thing at houses of public entertainment in this locality, for the Telemark deserves only too well its surname of the Buttermilk Country.

At Tiness, Listhus, Tinoset, and many other places, no bread is to be had, or if there be, it is of such poor quality as to be uneatable.
One finds there only an oaten cake, known as _flat brod_, dry, black, and hard as pasteboard, or a coarse loaf composed of a mixture of birch-bark, lichens, and chopped straw.