"Honourable B. Anker's House at Mos"

Tins house was the occasional residence of the late honourable chamberlain Bernard Anker, when he visited the town of Mos. It is a spacious and convenient dwelling, calculated for entertaining the large parties who generally attended him from the town of Christiania, to enjoy the society, and partake of the unbounded hospitality of that great and good man. The house is built in the old style, with high roof, covered with dark red glazed pantiles, enclosing a square court-yard. Two sides of the quadrangle are appropriated to state rooms ; the other two contain suites of apartments and lodging rooms for visitors. The principal fronts of this end are ornamented with pilasters and windows in the Palladian style, painted white. The spacious rooms have brilliant cut glass chandeliers suspended from the ceilings; and the walls are decorated with large pictures in distemper, representing some considerable water-falls in Norway. They are furnished in an elegant and comfortable manner, as billiard and ball rooms, and other festal apartments, the usual appendages to great houses in Norway. From the front, on the left or west side, is seen a part of the iron-works, with the furnace, forges, extensive yards, and wharfs, and vast quantities of that metal wrought into different forms. Beyond the foundry is a large stable for the horses employed, in which is a pillar of salt for them occasionally to lick, a custom esteemed very salutary in this country. The misplaced saw-mills in front interrupts all view of the cascade from the windows, between which and the house, the high road from Christiania winds over the bridge into the town of Mos. The water for the mills is collected from above the bridge, and is conveyed in a tank through the arch to the first wheel, under which it is again carefully collected in a kind of box, and transmitted by three shutes, as seen before the great fall, to the next mill, (regulated by small sluices at the half bridge) where after use, it is likewise preserved and continued to the next, and the others in succession, thus commanding a high descending power, not to be gained by the fall alone for so many mills. An equal distribution of water occurs on the other side of the fall, where the greater number of wheels are; the foundations of the mills are composed of rough hewn trees, laid across each other at right angles, resting their bases on the rocks,and open within. A crank is formed on the axis of the wheel to which the saw is affixed at bottom, and to a stationary swivel at the top, working perpendicularly. The timber is secured on a moveable frame in grooves midway, which the machinery pulls up to the saw at every cut during its operations, by means of a click wheel. They are boarded on the outside, and covered with red pantiles on the roof. The saw dust falls into the water, to the great obstruction of the navigation of many rivers, and to the detriment of the fish in Norway. Perhaps the absence of salmon, in some places, may be attributed in a great measure to this improvident and injurious custom.