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by Pursuivant » Fri Jul 25, 2008 6:37 pm
The Finns, though intellectually most interesting, are not as a rule attractive in person. Generally small of stature, thickset with high cheek-bones, and eyes inherited from theri Tartar-Mongolian ancestors, they cannot be considered good-looking; while the peculiar manner in which the blonde male peasants cut their hair is not becoming to their sunburnt skins, which are generally a brilliant red, especially about the neck where it appears below the light, fluffy, downy locks. Fat men are not uncommon; and their fatness is too frequently of a kind to make one shudder, for it resembles dropsy, and is, as a rule, the outcome of liqueur drinking, a very pernicious habit, in which many Finlanders indulge to exess. There are men in Suomi -dozens of them- so fat that no healthy Englishman could attain such dimensions; one of them will completely occupy the seat of an isvoschtschik, while the amount of adipose tissue his wrists and cheeks seems absolutely incredible when seen for the first time, and one wonders how any chair or carriage bear such a weight. Inordinately fat men are certainly one of the least pleasing of Finland's peculiarities.
Mrs. Alex Tweedie, Through Finland in Carts 1898
"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."