BEAR-HUNT.

Front.

FOREST SCENES
IN
NORWAY AND SWEDEN:
BEING
Extracts from the Journal of a Fisherman.

BY
THE REV. HENRY NEWLAND,
RECTOR AND VICAR OF WESTBOURNE,
AUTHOR OF “THE ERNE: ITS LEGENDS AND ITS FLY-FISHING,” ETC. ETC.

The Second Edition.

LONDON:
G. ROUTLEDGE & CO. FARRINGDON STREET;
NEW YORK: 18, BEEKMAN STREET.
1855.

TO MY MUCH-ESTEEMED FRIEND, THE PUBLIC.

My dear Public,—

I have frequently heard you remark, in that quaint and pithy manner so peculiarly your own, that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” If you should happen to find the book which I here present to your notice to be really of such a character as your friend Jack might have written under these distressing circumstances, I am afraid I cannot plead this very sensible observation of yours as my excuse; for I must confess, which I do with thankfulness, that in my time I have enjoyed quite as much play as is good for me, or for any one, in this working-day world of ours. On this point, therefore, my book must stand on its own merits.

But, as I am extremely solicitous of your good opinion, and should be very sorry to see you err on the opposite extreme, imagining, as indeed you might, that mine has been “all play and no work,” I must request you to look at the Parson at home as well as the Parson abroad,—in short, to read my “Confirmation and First Communion,” as well as my “Forest Life;” a proceeding which, if it does not benefit you, my dear Public (and I sincerely hope it may), will, at all events,—through the medium of his Publisher,—benefit, and that materially,

Your faithful Servant,

THE AUTHOR.

Westbourne Vicarage,
July 7th, 1854.

CONTENTS.

FOREST LIFE:
A
FISHERMAN’S SKETCHES IN NORWAY AND
SWEDEN.

INTRODUCTION.

Sketches in Norway and Sweden! Are they fact or fiction? are they to be instructive or simply entertaining? These are questions which the public has a right to ask, and which the author means to answer as truly as he can. He hopes there will be a little of both. At least, in making this selection from his own and his friends’ journals, he has had both these objects in his eye, and he trusts he has been able to keep his eye upon them both at the same time, and that without any very great amount of squinting. The framework which he has adopted is that of a very popular description of authors—the historical romancers, and, if he might venture to say so, of a certain equally popular historian: that is to say, fiction founded upon fact. He has laid down absolute facts, or what he believes to be facts, for his groundwork, and has dressed them up to suit his fancy.

These Northern Sketches are, in truth, a continuation of a former work, “The Erne, its Legends and its Fly-fishing;” as the expedition which gave rise to them was in every respect the same as the old Belleek fishing-association, with a simple change of scene. They are therefore written upon the same plan, which the author has found extremely convenient and very suitable to his purpose.

That purpose was not only to preserve the recollections of a most enjoyable time, but also to convey as much real information on the subjects treated on as he could compass; and with such an object before him, absolute fiction would have been useless.

His descriptions, therefore, in that book were real descriptions, his anecdotes, real anecdotes—the incidents of the story did actually happen; his instructions in the art of fly-fishing and the hydrography of the river were the results of his own experience, and the fairy legends were his own collections. Unless these things had been true, his book would have been merely a book of entertainment,—and he was ambitious of something beyond that. Everything of this kind, therefore, was recorded accurately; and in the few instances in which the requirements of the story compelled the author to transplant his incidents, their real localities were always given.

All this was important to the public, or, at least, as important as the subject itself; but it was of no consequence to any one, except for the gratification of mere curiosity, to be able to identify the precise Captain A. who broke the weirs of the Laune, while such information would not have raised Captain A.’s character at the Horse-Guards. The Liberal member for B. might enjoy the recollection of the row he got up at Kildoney, but might not find it convenient to be reminded of it on the hustings. Attorneys might look askance at Barrister C., who for a whole summer had directed his studies to the practice of Club-law; while Parson D., who had passed three months of his life waist-high in the Erne, might possibly expect, were he identified, to have cold water thrown upon him by his Bishop for the rest of his life.

With all these matters, interesting enough to the characters themselves, the public had nothing whatever to do: it was sufficient for them that they had their information and their story; and, provided the incidents of that story happened to some one, it signified little to them, which, of all the letters of the alphabet, composed his name. The public should feel grateful to any fisherman who has truly revealed the silks and feathers of his favourite fly; it is what very few fishermen will do: let them be satisfied with that: they shall never know—they have no right to know—which of all the “Squires” that haunted the Erne it was who landed the “Schoolmaster” on the “Bank of Ireland.”

In the present sketches the author has not so much reason to conceal the names of his characters; he can hurt no one. He has no rows or “ructions” to record; more’s the pity, for there is nothing so interesting to read about. Still, there are advantages in carrying out the same plan: first, it makes the continuation obvious—some of the Erne characters are again introduced: and this is not a fiction; for when rail-roads began to multiply, and sporting cockneys began to infest the innocent Erne, frightening its salmon and exacerbating its proprietors, that pleasant coterie of fishermen, who, in earlier and better times, were wont to concoct their punch and tell their stories at Mother Johnstone’s fire-side, and hang their great two-handed rods upon her hospitable brackets, actually did betake themselves to the exile of foreign lands.

But, in the second place, it conveys the same information in a more entertaining manner: the author is able to piece his characters; making them, like Mrs. Malaprop’s Cerberus, “three gentlemen at once,” by combining into one the incidents that happened to many. The author has thus availed himself of other journals and other note-books besides his own, and has been able to appropriate their contents, and to distribute whatever was characteristic of the country, into a series of connected sketches, instead of perpetually changing his locality and introducing new characters. He by no means intends to identify himself with his fictitious Parson, nor will he even undertake to say, that he was himself in all instances personally present whenever the Parson comes upon the scene: he will answer for the truth of nothing beyond the detached incidents and descriptions.

Neither can these Sketches be used as an itinerary. Now and then, though not often, names of places have been even suppressed or altered, and incidents transplanted. They will, indeed, give glimpses—slight, but true as far as they go—of northern scenery, costume, travelling peculiarities, and, above all, sport. They will contain practical hints and available directions, but it is only in a general way. They are not at all intended as a guide-book, nor will they at all supersede the indispensable Murray.

The traveller, following upon the author’s footsteps, will find himself lost at two points of the narrative—the village of Soberud, and the locality of the Skal. In the former of these the reason is evident enough—the author wishes to convey an idea of what sort of men the Norwegian clergy are, not to draw the attention of subsequent travellers to any individual clergyman. In the case of the skal there is another reason. Although Mr. Lloyd, the author of “Northern Wild Sports,” being a great hunter, has always contrived to get a shot at the bear, it is, nevertheless, true, that an ordinary man sees about as much of a skal as a regimental officer does of a battle—that is to say, he sees about a dozen men on each side of him: and, it may well happen, that the share of any given individual in the most successful of skals, will amount to hearing a great deal of firing, and, at the end of three or four days’ hard work, seeing five or six carcasses paraded at the nearest village. In order, therefore, to give his readers a graphic sketch of a skal, without violently outraging probability, it was necessary for the author to make his ground, that is to say, to imagine ground of such a description that it was possible for his characters to see what was going on. It is not altogether fictitious either, for the traveller will find a good deal of it in the Toftdahl Valley, though this was never, so far as the author knows, the scene of a summer skal.

Similarly, also, though there is no such village as Soberud, that being the name of a district near Larvig in which Sir Hyde Parker’s fishing-lodge is situated and where the author caught a good many salmon and trout, yet the traveller will be able to patch together the fictitious country from real and actual elements. The church is Hitterdahl—but as there is no lake at Hitterdahl, one has been borrowed for it from the country between Larvig and Frederiksvärn—the “Lake of the Woods” is, really, about four miles north-east of the village of Boen; the little lake where the diver was shot, together with the forest about it, about as far to the west of the same place; and the dark sombre pine wood is, really, situated in the valley of the Nid. This last has been slightly altered to suit the locality, for it is next to impossible to lose oneself in the Nid forest, the river itself being sufficient guide; but the rest is all drawn as accurately as the author’s recollections, aided by his journals, will enable him to depict it. With respect to the characters, Tom, Torkel, and Jacob were attendants on the author and his companions, and, though “a little rose upon,” to use a nautical expression, are drawn from actual life, and in their own proper names. The Captain and Parson, as has been said before, are not to be considered actual characters; that is to say, characters responsible as having done and said all that they are represented to have done and said, but merely as pegs upon which to hang the author’s personal experiences, or pieces of information which he may have received. The same may be said of Birger. It was necessary to associate with the party an intelligent Swede, and Lieut. Birger was chosen to fill that office. Bjornstjerna is wholly fictitious. Hjelmar is a real character; and his adventure in the Najaden frigate was related by him exactly as they are conveyed to the reader, the steamer following out among the islands the precise track of the chase. The author, however, will not undertake to say that the actual name of Hjelmar will be found on the watch and quarter bills of the frigate, though Hulm was actually her captain, and was actually buried near Lyngör, where his monument may be seen to this day. Moodie is a real character, though his name, also, is fictitious; or, rather, it is derived from a nick-name that the author understands he has acquired either by his courage or his foolhardiness: the appellation Modige, which is pronounced very like our English name, Moodie, is translatable either way. He does not, however, live at Gäddebäck, which is the name of a house formerly occupied by the celebrated Mr. Lloyd, the author of “Wild Sports of the North,” and “Scandinavian Adventures,” to whose kindness the author is indebted for his being able to describe, from experience, the fishing of the Gotha, which is drawn as accurately as the author’s recollection served him. The traveller need not, however, fear the quicksand which engulphed poor Jacob; that scene, and a very ridiculous one it was, occurred on the Torjedahl just below Oxea. The fisherman is cautioned not to be guided in his choice of a river by the author’s success on the Torjedahl. It is too clear, too much overhung, and too steadily and regularly rapid to be a first-rate river under any circumstances. There are few shallows in it, for there are no tributaries below the Falls of Wigeland, and no salmon can get above them; therefore, its breeding-ground is very limited indeed; probably the flats of Strei, Oxea, and Mosse Eurd, form the whole of it. The author’s success must be attributed to the fact of his fly having been the first of his kind that ever floated on those transparent waters.

The songs which are put into the mouths of the different characters, are really Norwegian or Swedish, and are given as specimens. They are translations by Hewitt, Forester, Knightley, and others. Scandinavia has always been remarkable for its lyrical poetry from the earliest times; and the Gammle Norgé of Bjerregaard, which is given in chapter viii., would seem to show that the cup of poetic inspiration which Odin stole from the keeping of Gunlauth, and stored up in Asgard, is not yet empty. By far the best of the modern poets of the North is Grundtvig, but his subjects are, for the most part, of a nature too solemn for a work so light as this; a short specimen from his hymns is given in chapter xviii. The Evening Hymn, in chapter xxiii., though in common use in Norway, is not Norwegian; it belongs to the ancient church, and is said to be as old as the days of Ambrose and Augustine.

The legends are collected from all manner of sources: many of them from Tom and Torkel, some from the Eddas and Sagas, some from Malet and Knightley; they are all, however, legitimate Scandinavian legends, believed implicitly by some one or other.

One word about the voyage out. It signifies little to the public when and where those incidents really happened—whether in the North Sea, or in the Bay of Biscay, or in the Mediterranean; but it signifies to them a great deal, to know that these things actually did happen once, and may happen again at any time.

The main incidents adapted to that fictitious voyage are strictly and literally true. A large steamer was upon one occasion in the precise situation ascribed to the Walrus,—and—in the absence of its skipper, who for the time had mysteriously disappeared—was saved by the promptness of one of the passengers, precisely as is described in the narrative. And it is also true that the same vessel, after a run of not more than five hundred miles, did find herself fifty miles out of her course. The compasses, no doubt, being in fault, as they always are on such occasions—poor things!

These are important matters for the public to be made acquainted with; for the public do very frequently go down to the sea in steamers, and therefore any individual reader may at any time find himself in the very same situation.

The author has enlarged upon this, in the faint hope of drawing attention to these matters. He would suggest that some sort of superintendence would not be altogether superfluous, and that it is not entirely right that the lives of two or three hundred men on the deep sea should be entrusted to a skipper not competent to navigate a river, nor be committed to a vessel so parsimoniously found as to be unable to encounter casualties which might happen any day in a voyage to Ramsgate.

On a subject so important as this, the author thinks it his duty to state that these incidents, extraordinary as they may appear, are in no way fictitious; that they did happen under his own eye; and that the mate, the only real sailor on board, did request of him, after the escape, a certificate that he, at least, had done his duty. If that man should be still alive, he possesses a most unique document, a certificate of seamanship, signed by a clergyman of the United Church of England and Ireland.

The skipper’s name the author does not think it necessary to record. He is not likely to be employed again; for he is one of those who have since immortalised themselves in the public prints, by losing his vessel—a circumstance which, it will readily be believed, did not excite any very great feelings of surprise in the mind of the author.

CHAPTER I.
PREPARATIONS.

“In every corner

Carefully look thou

Ere forth thou goest.”

Hávamál.

There is no saying more true than that “he who would make a tour abroad, must first make the tour of London.” There are miscellaneous articles of appropriate clothing to be got together; there are bags, knapsacks, portmanteaus, to be fitted. Above all, there are passports to be procured; than which no plague more vexatious, more annoying, or more utterly useless for any practicable or comprehensible purpose, has been devised by modern ingenuity.

But if this is a necessary preliminary on ordinary occasions, much more is it necessary when the contemplated expedition has for its object sporting, and the northern wildernesses for its contemplated locality. In addition to the cares of ordinary travel, there are now tents, blankets, cloaks, guns, rifles, to be thought of; rods, reels, gaffs, lines, to be overhauled and repaired; material-books to be replenished, and the commissariat department to be adequately looked to. Deep and anxious, yet not without their pleasures, are the responsibilities which rest on the shoulders of him who undertakes the conduct of such an expedition as this.

Such were the thoughts that crossed the mind of the Parson, as—business in his musing eye, care on his frowning brow, and determination in his compressed lip—he stood under the archway of the Golden Cross; his hands mechanically feeling for the pockets of his fishing-jacket, which had been exchanged for a clerical frock-coat more befitting the locality, and his mouth pursing itself up for his habitual whistle, which, had he indulged in it where he then stood, might have been considered neither appropriate nor decorous.

“Don’t you think this list rather a long one,” said the Captain, who had now joined him from the interior of the hotel, holding in his hand a pretty closely-written sheet of foolscap. “These are all very good things, and very useful things no doubt, but how are we to stow them, and how are we to carry them? Yours is anything but light marching order.”

“Why should it be?”

“My principle is, that no traveller can be too lightly equipped.”

“And a very good principle, too,” said the Parson. “Heavy and useless incumbrances are the invariable attributes of travelling Englishmen. You may know them by their endless train of household goods, as you would know a snail by its shell.”

“I believe,” said the Captain, “that foreign rail-roads are regulated precisely so as to tax us English tourists. Travel on whatever line you please in England, except that grasping Brighton and South Coast, and you may take just exactly what luggage you like; while abroad, the fare is so low and the charge for luggage so high, that an Englishman generally pays double; while the Frenchman, whose three spare collars and bottle of hair-oil are in his pocket; and the German, whose great tobacco-bag and little reticule of necessaries are so constructed as to fit the allowance, are permitted to go free.”

“Upon my word, I do not object to the tax; it is a tax upon folly. What can be so absurd as such a miscellaneous collection as Englishmen generally carry with them? What can a traveller want beyond a dry suit of clothes and half-a-dozen shirts and stockings?”

“There is a slight incongruity between your words and your actions,” said the Captain, holding up the list.

“Tush! put that paper into your pocket, and tell me what we are going to do. When I went on my reconnoitring expedition to Norway last year, my fourteen-foot rod, my fly-book, and a change of clothes constituted all the cares of my life; and I contend, as you do, that no traveller whose object is information has any business with more. But we are going now more in the character of settlers: we are not going to explore, but to enjoy that which has been explored for us. Why should we not, therefore, take whatever may make life enjoyable?”

“Only for fear we may be called upon to choose between leaving them behind or leaving our purpose unaccomplished,” said the Captain.

“Do you think I have calculated my ambulances so badly? But come along. We must consult Fortnum and Mason first. I can explain all that on our road.

“Considering how wild and uninhabited the greater part of the country is, both in Norway and Sweden,” the Parson resumed, as they crossed the pavement under Nelson’s pillar, “it is astonishing how easily you may travel, and how little impediment are your impedimenta. The posting regulations are admirable. On every road there are posting stations at convenient distances, and, by writing to these, the traveller may command, at stated prices, every horse and cart in the district.”

“And at moderate prices?” said the Captain, whose means were not so abundant as to make him indifferent to expense.

“No, not at moderate prices; for I do not call a penny an English mile a moderate price, and this is what you pay in Sweden; and in Norway it is not more than three-halfpence, except in favoured spots in the vicinity of towns, where they are permitted to charge three-fold. My plans, therefore, are these. We are not going to travel, but to visit certain fishing stations, most of which are at no great distance from the coast; let us take, therefore, everything that will make us comfortable at these different settlements. As long as we coast, we have always traders of some sort or other, and generally as nice and comfortable little steamers as you can desire. When our road lies along the fjords or lakes, boats are to be had from the post stations on the same terms as you get the carts, a rower reckoning the same as a horse; and when we want to take to the land, we have but to order as many carts as will hold our traps.”

“And how do we travel ourselves?” said the Captain.

“There is no carriage in the world so pleasant for fine weather as the cariole; and I propose that we each buy one. If we have to get them new, they do not cost above thirty specie-dalers—that is to say, about seven or eight pounds—with all their harness and fittings, in the very first style; and you may always sell them again at the end of your journey. That is the way the natives manage, and they are terrible gadabouts. You always find some jobber or other to take it off your hands. But the chances are that we shall meet with a choice of second-hand carioles to begin with. I gave twenty specie-dalers for mine last year, and sold it for fifteen. Drammen is the place for these things, up in Christiania fjord: it is the Long Acre of Norway.”

“What sort of things are these carioles?—Gigs, I suppose, to carry two.”

“Not they—barely one: and no great room for baggage either. A Scandinavian is of your way of thinking, and does not trouble himself with spare shirts. One horse draws one man, and that is all. If your gig carries two, you are charged a horse and a half for it. In Sweden they have a sort of light spring waggon, drawn by three horses, which will take our followers admirably, with as much luggage as we like to stow; and by having the collars of the harness made open at the top, they will do for all the variety of horses we may meet with on our road. This is better than the Norwegian mode of engaging the farm carts; for in this, so much time is lost at every stage in restowing luggage, that it becomes a serious hindrance. However, in Norway we must do as the Norwegians do. The light waggon would make a very unpleasant conveyance down some of their mountain roads.”

“And how do you manage crossing the fjords and lakes?”

“Easily enough. Every ferry-boat will take a cariole; and as for coasting, a cariole ranks as a deck passenger—that is to say, about ten skillings for a sea mile, you paying for your own passage in the cabin about twenty.”

“You travellers get so confoundedly technical. What the deuce do you mean by a sea mile and a skilling? And how am I to compare two things neither of which I know anything about?”

“A regular traveller’s fault,” said the Parson. “There is not a book written that does not abound with these absurdities. Well, a skilling is a halfpenny in our money, and a sea mile is four of our miles, and a land mile eight, nearly.”

“Pretty liberal in their measures of length,” said the Captain.

“Why, they have plenty of it, and to spare; as you will find when you come to travel from one place to another. But their money is not plentiful, and they dole it out in very small denominations indeed.”

“But here we are at Fortnum and Mason’s; and now for the stores.”

“I observe, you always go to the most expensive places,” said the Captain.

“That is because I cannot afford to go to the cheaper ones,” said the Parson. “On such an expedition as this, you should never take inferior stores. One hamper turning out bad when unpacked at the end of a thousand miles or so of carriage, will make more than the difference between the cheapest and the most expensive shop in London. But, to show you that I do study economy, I will resist the temptation of these preserved meats; and, let me tell you, it is a temptation, for up the country you will get nothing but what you catch, gather, or shoot. This, however, is a necessary,” pointing to some skins of portable soup; “there is not a handier thing for a traveller; it goes in the smallest compass of any sort of provisions; it is always useful on a pinch, and some chips of it carried in the waistcoat pocket on a pedestrian expedition, make a dinner, not exactly luxurious, but quite sufficient to do work upon. This we must lay in a good store of; in fact, if we have this, we need not be very anxious about anything else. Other things are luxuries: this is a necessary of life. Tea we must take: there is nothing more refreshing after a hard day’s work, and you cannot get it anywhere in the country. At least, what you do meet with is altogether maris expers, being a villanous composition of dried strawberry leaves and other home productions. Oil, too—we must take plenty of that; we shall want it for the frying-pan.”

“Have they no butter, then?” said the Captain.

“Yes, they have, and in great plenty too; of all varieties of quality, from very bad, down to indescribably beastly. They call it smör, pronouncing the dotted o like the French eu; and I can assure you their very best butter tastes just as the word sounds.”

“Well, then, I vote for some of these sardines, to take off the taste.”

“With all my heart,” said the Parson; “they flavour anything, when they are not made of salted bleak, as they generally are—so does cayenne pepper. We may as well have some cocoa paste, and a Bologna sausage or two may prove a useful luxury.”

“What do you say to a cask of biscuits?” said the Captain. “What sort of bread have they?”

“Do you recollect that old story told of Charles the Twelfth, when he said of the bread brought to him, that it was not good, but that it might be eaten? No one can tell the heroism of that speech who has not eaten the Swedish black bread, which is generally the only representative of the staff of life procurable. It is gritty, it is heavy, it is puddingy; if you throw it against a wall it will stick there—and as for sourness, O, ye gods! they purposely keep the leaven till it is uneatably sour, and then fancy it becomes wholesome.”

“Well, I suppose it does,” said the Captain. “The Squire used to say, that everything that was good, is unwholesome or wrong; and I suppose the converse is true. But why not take the biscuits?”

“Because we can get that which will answer our purpose perfectly when we arrive at the country, and that without the carriage, and at a much cheaper rate. There is not a seaport town in all the coast where you may not get what they call Kahyt Scorpor, a sort of coarse imitation of what nurses in England feed babies upon, under the name of tops and bottoms. They are made of rye, and are as black as my hat; but they are very good eating, keep for ever, and are cheap enough in all conscience, being from four to six skillings to the pound, that is to say, threepence. In Norway they call them Rö Kovringer.”

“We will take some rice, which very often comes in well by way of vegetables in a kettle of grouse soup; and a good quantity of chocolate, which packs easily, and furnishes a breakfast on the shortest possible notice. And this, I think, will do very well for the commissariat department of our expedition.”

“And now for arms and ammunition,” said the Captain.

“Everything we are likely to want in that department, we must take with us—guns, of course. Shot certainly may be got at Christiansand, and the other large towns; up the country, though, you will get neither that nor anything else: but powder can be got nowhere, at least, powder that does not give you an infinity of trouble in cleaning your gun, on account of the quantity of deposit it leaves. That little magazine of yours, with its block-tin canisters and brass screw-stoppers, will hold enough for us two, unless we meet with very good sport indeed, and in that case we must put up with the manufacture of the country.”

“And for guns?” said the Captain. “I shall certainly take that little pea-rifle I brought from Canada. I want to bring down a bear.”

“We shall be more likely to get a crack at a seal, where we are going,” said the Parson. “Bears are not so plentiful in Norway as is generally supposed. People imagine that they run about in flocks like sheep; however, it is possible that there may be a bear-hunt while we are there. As for rifles, I own I am partial to our own English manufacture. Those little pea affairs are sensible things enough in their own country, where one wanders for weeks on end through interminable forests and desolate prairies on foot, and where a pound of lead more or less in your knapsack is a matter of consequence: but where we have means of transport, I see no great sense in them. A pea, no doubt, will kill, if it hits in the right place; but, like the old Duke, I have myself rather a partiality for the weighty bullet. However, each man to his fancy. The great merit of every gun, rifle, or pistol, lies behind the stock,—a truth that dandy sportsmen are apt to forget; a pea sent straight is better than a two-ounce ball beside the mark.”

“Well,” said the Captain, laughing, “I think I can hold my little Yankee pretty straight; but we shall want shot-guns more than rifles. I may as well take that case I had from Westley Richards, if you do not think it too heavy.”

“Not at all; you can always leave the case behind, and take one gun in a waterproof cover when we go on light-armed expeditions. This will furnish us with a spare gun in case of accidents. I shall take my own old one, and a duck gun—which last will be common property, and I think with this we shall be pretty sufficiently armed. Pointers and setters are of no great use, unless it is a steady old stager, who will retrieve; for you must recollect there is no heath, and very little field shooting. The character of the country is cover, not very thick anywhere, and in many places interspersed with glades and openings. We shall do better with beaters: a water-dog, however, is indispensable. Lakes and rivers abound, and so do ducks, teal, and snipes.”

“Have you thought about tents?” said the Captain.

“Well,” said the Parson, “I am not sure that tents are indispensable, and they certainly are not a little cumbersome. While we are fishing we can do very well without them: by the water-side we can never be without a cottage of some sort to put our heads under if it should come on bad weather, for every house in the whole country stands on the banks of some lake or river. I must say, though, when you get up into the fjeld after the grouse and the ducks, or, it may be, bigger game, it is another affair altogether. You may then go twenty or thirty miles on end without seeing a human habitation, unless you are lucky enough to meet with a säter, and you know what a highland bothy is, for dirt and vermin. But, even in the fjeld, I do not know that we should want tents; you can have no idea of the beauty of a northern summer’s night, and the very little need one has of any cover whatever. I remember, last year, standing on one of their barrows, smoking my pipe at the foot of an old stone cross, coeval, probably, with St. Olaf, and shadowing the tomb of some of his followers that Hakon the Jarl thinned off so savagely. It was deep midnight, and there was not a chill in the air, or dew enough on the whole headland to fill the cup of a Lys Alf. The full round moon was shining down upon me from the south, while a strong glowing twilight was still lighting up the whole northern sky, where the sun was but just hid under the horizon. The whole scene was as light as day, with the deep solemn stillness of midnight all the while. I could distinctly make out the distant fishing-boats; I could almost distinguish what the men were doing in them, through the bright and transparent atmosphere; but at the same time all was so still that I could hear the whistle of the wings, as flight after flight of wild-fowl shot over me in their course to seaward, though they were so high in the air that I could not distinguish the individual birds, only the faint outline of the wedge-like figure in which they were flying. I remember, that night, thinking how perfectly unnecessary a tent was, and determining not to bring one; and, that night at all events, I acted up to my conviction; for, when my pipe was out, I slept at the foot of the old cross till the sun warned me that the salmon were stirring.”

“All very pleasant, no doubt,” said the Captain; “very enjoyable indeed: but does it never rain at night in this favoured land of yours?”

“Upon my word, it does not very often,” said the Parson; “at least, not in the summer-time. Besides, you cannot conceive how well the men tent themselves with pine-branches.”

“I do not quite like the idea,” said the Captain. “It is all very well to sleep out when anything is to be got by it; but, when there is nothing to be got by it but the rheumatism, to tell you the honest truth—unlucky, as the old women say it is—I rather prefer contemplating the moon through glass.”

“Well, I will tell you what we can do,” said the Parson, “and that will be a compromise. We can get some canvas made up into two lug sails. These will help us uncommonly in our passage over lakes and fjords, for their boats are seldom well provided in that respect; and when we get to our destination, lug sails—being square, or, to speak more accurately, parallelogrammatical—will make us very capital gipsy tents, with two pairs of cross-sticks and a ridge-pole, which we shall always be able to cut from the forest. I think we may indulge ourselves so far. As for waterproof jackets, trousers, boots, and so forth, I need not tell you about that: you have been out before, and know the value of these when you want to fish through a rainy day. We shall not have so dripping a climate here as we had in Ireland, certainly, but we shall have one use for our waterproof clothing which we had not there, and that is, when we bivouac, vulcanised India-rubber is as good a defence against the dew and the ground-damp as it is against the rain. A case of knife, fork, and spoon apiece is absolutely necessary, for they do not grow in the fjeld. A light axe or two, and a couple of hand-bills, a hammer and nails, which are just as likely to be wanted to repair our land-carriages as our boats. If you are at all particular in shaving—which, by-the-by, is not at all necessary—you may as well take a portable looking-glass. You will not find it so easy to shave in the reflection of a clear pool—a strait to which I was reduced when I was there last year. And now, I think, we have everything—that is to say, if you have taken care of the fishing-tackle, as you engaged to do.”

“I have not taken care of your material-book.”

“No,” said the Parson; “but I have taken very good care of that myself. Fly-making may be a resource to fall back upon, if we meet with rainy weather, and my book is well replenished.”

“Everything else,—rods, books, reels, gaffs, and so forth,—I have packed in the old black box which we had with us at Belleek, with spare line, and water-cord, and armed wire, and eel hooks, and, in fact, everything that we can possibly want; and a pretty heavy package it makes, I can assure you.”

“Well,” said the Parson, “we may go to sleep now with a clear conscience. But so much depends upon a good start, that a little extra trouble, on the first day, will be found to save, in the end, a multiplicity of inconveniences.”

CHAPTER II.
THE VOYAGE.

“Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising,—

Stamp and go, boys! up she’s rising,—

Round with a will! and up she’s rising,

Early in the morning.

What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—

What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—

Put him in the long-boat and make him bale her,

Early in the morning.

Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising.”—

&c. &c. ad infinitum.

Anchor Song.

Clear and joyous as ever a summer’s day came out of the heavens, was the 12th of June, 18—, when the good ship Walrus, with her steam up, her boats secured, and everything ready for sea, lay lazily at single anchor off Blackwall-stairs. The weather was as still and calm as weather might be. The mid-day sun, brilliant and healthful, imparted life and animation even to the black and unctuous waters, that all that morning had, in the full strength of the spring tide, been rushing past her sides. The breeze, light and fitful, just stirred the air, but was altogether powerless on the glazy surface of the stream, which sent back, as from a polished and unbroken mirror, the exact double of every mast, yard, and line of cordage, that reposed above it. The ships lay calm and still. The outward-bound had tided down with the first of the ebb, and were already out of sight, and the few sails that still hung festooned in their bunt and clew-lines, lay as motionless as the yards that held them. Like light and airy dragon-flies, just flitting on the surface, and apparently without touching it, the river steamers were darting from wharf to wharf; while ever and anon a great heavy sea-going vessel would grind her resistless way, defying wind and tide, and dashing the black wave against the oily-looking banks.

Steamer after steamer passed, each steadily bent on her respective mission; and the day wore on—yet there lay the Walrus, though her sea-signalling blue Peter had hung from her fore-truck ever since day-light, and the struggling and impatient steam would continually burst in startling blasts from her safety-valves. The tide was slackening fast; the chain cable, that all that forenoon had stretched out taut and tense from her bows, like a bar of iron, now hung up and down from her hawsehole, while the straws and shavings and floating refuse of the great capital began to cling round her sides.

“It is a great honour, no doubt, to carry an ambassador, with Heaven knows how many stars of every degree of Russian magnitude in his train,” said the Parson, who, seated on the taffrail, with his legs dangling over the water, had been watching the turning tide, and grumbling, as ship after ship in the lower reaches began to swing at her anchors, while three or four of the more energetic craft were already setting their almost useless sails, and yo-ho-ing at their anchors, preparatory to tiding up; “it is a very great honour, and I hope we are all duly sensible of it; but, like most great honours, it is a very particular nuisance. These Russian representatives of an autocrat majesty must fancy they can rule the waves, when all the world knows it is only Britannia that can do that. They have let the whole of this lovely tide pass by—(the Parson cast his eyes on the greasy water)—and fancy, I suppose, that daddy Neptune is bound to supply them with a new one whenever they please to be ready for it.”

“Why, Mate!” said the Captain, as a smart sailor-like looking fellow fidgeted across the quarter-deck, with an irregular step and an anxious countenance; “is this what you call sailing at ten a.m. precisely? Most of us would have liked another forenoon on shore, but your skipper was so confounded peremptory; and this is what comes of it.”

“What is one to do, sir?” said the Mate, who seemed fully to participate in the Captain’s grievance. “These Russians have taken up all the private cabins for their own particular use, and occupy half the berths in the main and fore-cabins besides—we cannot help waiting for them. They have pretty well chartered the ship themselves—what can we do? But,” continued he, after a pause, during which he had been looking over the side, as the steamer now began evidently to swing in her turn, “I wish we had gone down with the morning’s tide.”

“We should have been at the mouth of the river by this time,” said the Captain, “if we had started when we ought.”

“Yes,” said the Mate, “and we should now be crossing the dangerous shoals, with fair daylight and a rising tide before us.”

“Why, surely you are not afraid,” said the Parson; “that track is as well beaten as the turnpike road.”

The Mate shrugged his shoulders, and stepped forward, giving some unnecessary orders in a tone unnecessarily sharp and angry.

“Well, Birger, what news? Do you see anything of them?”

The individual addressed was a smart, active, little man, with a quick grey eye, and a lively, pleasant, good-humoured countenance, who was coming aft from the bridge of the steamer, on which he had been seated all the forenoon, sketching, right and left of him groups of shipping on the water and groups of idlers on the deck.

“Anything of whom?” said he. “Oh! the Russians. No, I don’t know. I suppose they will come some time or other; it does not signify—it is all in the day’s work. Look here,”—and he opened his portfolio, and displayed, in wild confusion all over his paper, the domes of Woolwich, the houses of Blackwall, the forests of masts and yards in the Pool, two or three picturesque groups of vessels, a foreign steamer or two, landing her weary and travel-soiled passengers at the Custom-house—and, over leaf, and in the background as it were, slight exaggerations of the ungainly attitudes in which his two friends were then sprawling. “If you had found something as pleasant as this grumbling to fill up your time with, you would not be wasting your eyes and spoiling your temper in looking for the Russians. They are going back to their own country, poor devils! no wonder they are slow about it. Did you ever see a boy going to school?”

“Birger is not over-fond of the Russians,” said the Captain.

“Few Swedes are,” said Birger; “remember Finland and Pomerania.”

“Besides, it is not over-pleasant to have a great White Bear sitting perpetually at one’s gate, always ready to snap up any of one’s little belongings that may come in its way. The Russian fleet is getting formidable, and Revel and Kronstadt are not very far from the mouth of the Mälar.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Birger, gallantly; “we are the sons of the men who, under Gustaf, taught that fleet a lesson.”

“You are a gallant set of fellows,” said the Parson; “and Sweden would be a precious hard nut to crack. But your long-armed friends over the water know the value of a ring fence, and would dearly like a seaboard. Only fancy that overpowering country, which is now kept in order by the rest of Europe, only because, just at present, it lies at the back of creation, and cannot get out of the Baltic, Black, and White Seas, to do harm to any one,—only fancy that pleasant land, with its present unlimited resources, and Gothenborg for its Portsmouth, and Christiania, and Frederiksvärn and Christiansand for its outports—a pleasant vision, is it not, Mr. Guardsman? Don’t you think it probable that something of this sort has soothed the slumbers of the White Bear we were speaking of, before this?”

“Did you ever hear of Charles the Twelfth? He taught that White Bear to dance.”

“He taught that White Bear to fight,” said the Captain, “and an apt scholar he found him. There was more lost at Pultava than Charles’s gallant army.”

“There are men in Sweden yet,” said Birger, slightly paraphrasing the legend of “Holger.”

“There are,” said the Parson; “and if you could only agree among yourselves, you might have hopes of muzzling the White Bear yet. Another union of Calmar?”

“O, hang the union of Calmar; there is no more honesty in a Dane or a Norseman than there is in a Russ. We are not going to have another Bloodbath at Stockholm. My mother is a Lejonhöved,[1] and I am not likely to forget that day.”

“I should have thought you more nearly connected with the Svinhöved family,” said the Parson; “but depend upon it, unless you men of the north can make up your quarrels, the White Bear will chop you up in detail, and us after you.”

Birger, who, in some incomprehensible way, traced his descent from the founder of Stockholm, the great and terrible Earl Birger, was a smart young subaltern in the Royal Guards, and though his present dress—a modest and unpretending blouse—was anything but military, his well-set-up figure, firm step, and jaunty little forage cap stuck on one side of his head, sufficiently revealed his profession. From his earliest youth he had discovered a decided talent for drawing, and in accordance with a most praiseworthy custom in the Swedish service, he had been travelling for the last twelvemonth at the expense of the Government, and was now returning to the “Kongs Ofver Commandant’s Expedition,” with a portfolio filled with valuable sketches, and a mind no less well stored with military knowledge, which he had collected from every nation in Europe. The Captain had fallen in with him at the Swedish ambassador’s, and, being himself something of an artist, had struck up on the spot a sort of professional friendship with him. The pleasant little subaltern was thus, from that time forward, enrolled among their party; and though their acquaintance was not yet of twenty-four hours’ standing, was at that moment talking and chatting with all the familiarity of old and tried friendship.

“Here come those precious rascals at last,” said he, breaking off the conversation, as a train of at least half-a-dozen carriages rattled down to the landing-place, and counts, countesses, tutors, barons, children, dogs, governesses, portmanteaus, bags, boxes, and trunks were tumbled out indiscriminately on the landing-place. “Heaven and earth! if they have not impedimenta enough for an army! and this is only their light marching baggage either. All their heavy articles came on board yesterday, and are stowed under hatches. I’ll be bound we draw an additional foot of water for them. Hang the fellows! they are as bad as Junot, they are carrying off the plunder of half the country.”

“Like the Swedes under Oxenstjerna,” said the Parson; “but what need you care for that? The plunder—if it is plunder—comes from England, not Sweden.”

“It will lumber up the whole cabin, whether it comes from the one or the other,” said Birger; “we shall not have room to swing a cat.”

“We don’t want to swing a cat,” said the Parson; “that is a Russian amusement rather than an English or a Swedish one, if all tales be true; and you may depend upon it we shall fare all the better for their presence: our skipper could never think of setting anything short of turtle and venison before such very magnificent three-tailed bashaws.”

“Yes,” said Birger, “they are going to Petersburgh, too, where the chances are, the bashaws will find some good opportunity of squaring accounts with the skipper for any ill-treatment, before the steamer is permitted to sail.”

All the while this conversation was going on, the illustrious passengers were rapidly accomplishing the short passage from the shore to the steamer, a whole flotilla of boats being employed in the service, while the hurried click of the pauls, and the quick revolutions of the windlass, as the chain-cable was hove short, showed that in the Captain’s opinion, as well as that of the Mate, quite time enough had been wasted already.

But the golden opportunity had been lost. English tides respect no man, not even Russian ambassadors, and old Father Thames was yet to read them a lesson on the text—

If you will not, when you may,

When you will, you shall have Nay.

While the vessel was riding to the ebb tide, as she had done all the morning, a warp which had been laid out from her port quarter would have canted her head well into the stream; and the tide, acting on her starboard bow while the after-part was in comparatively still water, would have winded her downwards, almost before her paddles were in motion, or her rudder could be brought to act. But the turn of the tide had reversed all this. The vessel had indeed swung to the flood, which by this time was rattling up at the rate of five or six miles an hour, and thus her bowsprit was looking the way she wanted to go; but a strong eddy was now bubbling up under her starboard bow, and pressing it towards the left bank, while a great lumbering Indiaman lay just ahead of her, and a Hamburgh steamer, which had anchored a little higher up on her starboard quarter, forbade all reversing of the engine and thus getting out of the mess stern foremost.

The moment the anchor broke ground the helm was put hard a-port, and the paddles were set in motion; but though from the tide alone the rudder had some effect, the strength of the eddy was too much for her; round came her head to port, as if she were going to take a leap at the embankment.

“Hard a-port!—hard a-starboard!—ease her!—stop her!—turn her a-head!” were the contradictory orders bawled out almost simultaneously. If noise and shouting could have got the steamer out of the scrape, there was no lack of it; but all these cries, energetic as they were, produced no effect whatever, beyond exciting a little suspicion in the mind of our travellers (some of whom having been at sea before, knew the stem of a ship from the stern) that the skipper was not altogether a “deacon in his craft;” and thus giving a point to the Mate’s silent but expressive shrug when the Parson had alluded to the shoals at the river’s mouth. At last, an indescribable sensation of grating, and a simultaneous volley of heterogeneous oaths, such as sailors shot their guns with on grand occasions, announced the fact that she had taken the ground abaft.

This, however, as it turned out, was about the best thing that could have happened, for it gave the skipper time to collect his senses; or, what was more to the purpose, gave the Mate time to whisper in his ear; and the rising tide was sure to float her again in ten minutes. By this time a warp had been got out to a ship anchored upon the Surrey side, an expedient which any sailor would have thought of before tripping his anchor in the first instance. The end of it was passed round the windlass and hove taut, and as the rising water slowly lifted the unlucky vessel from her sludgy bed and a few turns brought a strain upon her, she gradually slewed her head outwards. The steam was turned on, the paddles went round; the black water began to fizz under her counter, as if a million of bottles of stout had been poured into it—she was at last a-weigh and fairly on her course, only about six hours after her proper time.

“I tell you what,” said the Parson, as he dived down the companion to inspect the submarine arrangements of the cabin, “I leave this vessel at Christiansand, and I wish we were fairly out of her. This fellow knows no more of sea-craft than a tailor. Kind Providence shield us, or we shall come to grief yet!”

CHAPTER III.
THE SHIPWASH SAND.

“Our ship,

Which but three glasses since we gave out split,

Is tight and yare and bravely rigged, as when

We first put out to sea.”

Tempest.

One by one the travellers crept down to the cabin. It was as uncomfortable as cabins usually are, perhaps more so, as being more lumbered and more crowded; and the ordinary space for locomotion had been miserably curtailed by a large supplementary table, which the steward was lashing athwart ship for the dinner accommodation of the supernumerary passengers. These were standing about here and there, as helpless and uncomfortable as people always are on first starting, and were regarding one another with looks of suspicion and distrust, as people who start by a public conveyance always do regard one another.

In this the English part of the community was prominently conspicuous. Denizens of a free land, it would seem as if they considered it as their bounden duty to be continually exhibiting their Magna Charta in the eyes of foreigners, and to maintain their just rights to the very death against all comers.

No rights, however, were invaded—there was no opportunity of asserting the Magna Charta; all were equally shy and equally miserable; till, by degrees, as the steamer crept slowly down the river against the tide, they shook into their places, and the ladies began to smile, and the ladies’ maids to look gracious.

The Parson was an old stager. Knowing full well the value of light and air in the present crowded state of the cabin, he had very willingly assented to the apologetic invitation of the steward, and had established himself comfortably enough on the transom itself, upon which was spread for his accommodation a horsehair mattress. There was no great deal to spare in the height of his domicile, for it was as much as he could conveniently manage to sit upright in it; but it was, at all events, retired, airy, and not subject to be suddenly evacuated by its occupant under the overpowering influence of a lee lurch or a weather roll.

Totally disregarding the bustle and confusion in the cabin below him, he was occupied in arranging and beautifying his temporary home. The sill of one window formed his travelling library, the books of which he had been unpacking from his stores, and securing by a piece of spun yarn from the disagreeable consequences of any sudden send of the ship in a rolling sea. The next formed his toilet-table and workshop, exhibiting his reels and fly-books, and the huge and well-known “material book,” the replenishing of which had occupied so much of his attention. The third was left empty, so as to be opened and shut at pleasure.

Stretched on his mattress, with a guide-book in his hand, and the map of Norway and Sweden at his side, he looked from his high abode on the turmoil of the cabin deck, with all the calmness and complacency with which the gods of the Epicureans are said to regard the troubles and distresses of mortals below.

And thus wore on the day. Dinner, tea, had been discussed—some little portion of constraint and shyness had been rubbed off—small knots of men were formed here and there, discussing nothings and making conversation. Night sank down upon the steamer as she ploughed her way across the Nore, and the last of the talkers rolled himself up in his bedclothes, and tried, though for a long while in vain, to accustom himself to public sleeping.

It was still dark—for the time was hardly three in the morning—when the Parson—who, accustomed to all the vicissitudes of travel, had been making the most of the hours of darkness, and had been for some time fast asleep—was suddenly startled from his dreams by a furious concussion on the rudder-case against which his head was pillowed. The vessel became stationary, and the fresh breezey hissing of the water in her wake and the tremulous motion everywhere suddenly ceased.

“By George, she’s hard and fast!” said the Captain; who, taking hint from the comfortable appearance which the Parson had given to his own berth, had occupied the same position on the starboard side, and was now invading the Parson’s territories from abaft the rudder-case.

“What the devil is to be done now?”

“Nothing at all,” said the Parson; “it is no business of ours; and I am sure it is not time to get up yet.”

“Well, but she has certainly struck on a sand.”

“I know that as well as you,” said the Parson; “but you can’t get her off. Besides, there is not a bit of danger yet, at all events, for the sea is as smooth as a mill-pond. There they go, reversing their engine: much good that will do. If there was any truth in that bump I felt, she is much too fast aground for that. And the tide falling too!”—he continued, striking a lucifer and looking at his watch. “Yes, it is falling now, it has turned this hour or more.”

By this time the hurried trampling and stamping on deck had roused up the passengers, few of whom could comprehend what had happened, for there was no appearance of danger, and the ship was as steady and firm as a house. But there is nothing more startling or suggestive of alarm than that rushing to and fro of men, so close to the ear, which sounds to the uninitiated as if the very decks were breaking up.

“Is it houraccan storrm?” shouted Professor Rosenschall, a fat greasy-looking Dane, whom Birger had been hoaxing and tormenting all the day before, partly for fun, and partly because he considered it the bounden duty of a true Swede to plague a Dane—paying off the Bloodbath by instalments.

“Steward!” shouted the Professor, above all the din and confusion of the cabin, “Steward, vinden er stærkere? is it houraccan storrm?”

“Yes, Professor, I am sorry to say it is,” said Birger, who had rolled himself up in a couple of blankets under the table, upon which was reposing the weight of the Professor’s learning. “It is what we call an Irish hurricane—all up and down.”

“All up! O what will become of me—and down! O, my poor wife. Hvilken skrækelig storrm,” he screamed out, as half-a-dozen men clapped on to the tackle falls over his head, with the very innocent purpose of lowering the quarter-boat, and began clattering and dashing down the coils of rope upon the deck. “Troer de at der er fore paa Færde?—do you think there is any danger?”

What with the Professor’s shouting, and what with the real uncertainty of the case, and the natural desire that every one, even the most helpless, has to see their peril and to do something for themselves, every passenger was by this time astir, and the whole cabin was buzzing like a swarm of bees.

The Parson’s idea of sleeping was altogether out of the question; and, the Captain having gone on deck, he very soon followed him; for, notwithstanding his assumed coolness, he was by no means so easy in his mind as he would have his friends to understand. He had been at sea before this, and was, at least, as well aware as they, that grounding out of sight of land, is a very different thing from grounding in the Thames.

The scene on deck was desolate enough. The steamer had struck on the Shipwash, a dangerous shoal on the Essex coast, distant about twenty miles from land; and a single glance was sufficient to tell that there was not a chance of getting her off for the next twelve hours, though the Skipper was persisting in trying a variety of absurd expedients. The crew were looking anxious—the passengers were looking frightened; while the Skipper himself, who ought to have been keeping up every one’s spirits, was looking more wretched and more frightened than any one.

The day was just breaking, but a fog was coming on, and the wind showed every symptom of freshening. The vessel, indeed, had begun to bump, but the tide leaving her, that motion left her also, and she began now to lie over on her bilge. From some unfortunate list she had got in her stowing (Birger declared it was the weight of the ambassador’s despatch boxes), she fell over to windward instead of to leeward, thus leaving her decks perfectly exposed to the run of the sea, if the wind should freshen seriously.

When the Parson came on deck, the boats had just returned from sounding. The Skipper had, indeed, endeavoured to lay out an anchor with them—an object in which he might possibly have succeeded, had he tried it at first and before there was any great rush of tide, for the steamer had struck at the very turn of the flood; but he had wasted his time in reversing his engines and in backing and taking in sails which there was no wind to fill; and thus, before he had got his anchor lashed to the boat, which, like all passage steamers’ boats, was utterly inadequate for the work, the stream was strong enough to swamp boat, anchor, and all, and it was fortunate indeed that no lives were lost.

It appeared from the soundings that the ship had not struck on the main shoal, but on a sort of spit or ridge, the neck of a submarine peninsula projecting from the S.W. corner of it. Almost under her bows was a deep turnhole or bay in the sand about two cables across, communicating with the open water, beyond which, right athwart her hawse, lay the main body of the shoal, so that the beacon which marked its northern extremity, and which was now beginning to show in the increasing light of the morning, lay broad on her port bow, while the other end of the shoal was well on her starboard beam; at half a cable length astern, and on her port quarter and beam was the deep water with which the turnhole communicated,—this being, in fact, the channel she ought to have kept.

It was perfectly evident that nothing could be done till the top of the next tide, and whether anything could be done then was extremely problematical with the wind rising and the sea getting up; experience having already shown that there was not a boat in the steamer fit for laying out an anchor.

However, for the present the water was smooth enough; they were for the time perfectly safe and comfortable, lying, as they did, under the lee of the shoal, patches of which were now beginning to show just awash; while the seas were breaking heavily enough certainly, but a full half-mile to windward of them. The passengers, seeing nothing to alarm them, and feeling their appetites well sharpened by their early rising, began to lose their fears and to be clamorous for breakfast; and the meal was served with a promptness which, under the circumstances, was perfectly astonishing.

Those who know nothing fear nothing, and the jokes which were flying about and the general hilarity which pervaded the whole meeting, conveyed anything rather than the idea of shipwrecked mariners; though, truth to say, this feeling did not seem to be fully participated in by the Skipper, who presided at what might very fairly be called the head of the table, for it was many feet higher than the foot; he looked all the while as if he was seated on a cushion stuffed with bramble bushes.

The Parson, by way, he said, of utilising his moments, was preparing for fishing—calculating, and rightly too, that the whiting would congregate under the lee of the stranded ship.

He had made his preparations with characteristic attention to his own comfort and convenience. The dingy, which was hanging at the stern davits, formed at once his seat and his fishing-basket; and as he had eased off as much of the lee tackle fall as brought the boat to an even keel, the taffrail itself afforded him a shelter from the wind, which was now getting high enough to be unpleasant.

There he sat, hour after hour, busily and very profitably employed, heeding the gradual advance and strengthening of the tide only so far as its increasing current required the use of heavier leads.

The Captain and Birger had been trying to walk the sloping deck, a pursuit of pedestrianism under difficulties, for it was very much as if they had been trying to walk along the roof of a house. Time hangs heavily on the hands of those who have nothing to do, and there was nothing to do by the most active of sailors beyond hoisting the ensign union downwards, and that might just as well have been left undone too, for all the notice that was taken of it. Ship after ship passed by—the foreign traders to windward, the English through the shorter but more dangerous channel that lay between them and the main land. Many of them were quite near enough for anxious passengers to make out the people in them reconnoitring the position of the unfortunate Walrus through their telescopes. But if they did look on her, certainly they passed by on the other side; it never seemed to enter into the heads of one of them to afford assistance.

“Pleasant,” said Birger, “very. Is this the way your sailors help one another in distress?”

“I am afraid so,” said the Captain.

“Gayer insects fluttering by

Ne’er droop the wing o’er those that die;

And English tars have pity shown

For every failure but their own.”

“You do not mean to say that they will not help us if there really is danger?” said the Swede.

“Upon my word, I hope there will not be any real danger; for if you expect any help from them, I can tell you that you will not get it.”

“Not get it!” said Birger, who did not at all seem to relish the prospect before him.

“That you will not. Sink or swim, we sink or swim by our own exertions. Those scoundrels could not help us without losing a whole tide up the river, a whole day’s pay of the men, and so much per cent. on the cargo, besides the chance of being forestalled in the market: do you think they would do that to save the lives of half-a-hundred such as you and me? Why, you have not learned your interest tables; you do not seem to understand how much twenty per cent. in a year comes to for a day. A precious deal more than our lives are worth, I can tell you.”

Birger looked graver still; drowning for a soldier was not a professional death, and he did not relish the idea of it.

The Captain continued his words of comfort. “I was very nearly losing a brother this way myself,” he said. “He was invalided from the coast of Africa, and had taken his passage home in a merchant vessel. They had met with a gale of wind off the Scillies; the ship had sprung a leak, and when the gale had subsided to a gentle easterly breeze dead against them, there were they within twenty miles of the Longships, water-logged, with all their boats stove, and their bulwarks gone. Timber ships do not sink very readily, and incessant pumping had kept them afloat, but it was touch and go with that—their decks awash, and the seas rolling in at one side and out at the other. While they were in this state, the whole outward-bound fleet of English ships passed them, some almost within hailing distance, and all without taking more notice of them than those scoundrels are taking of us. They would, all hands, have gone to the bottom together, in the very midst of their countrymen, if a French brig had not picked them off and carried them into Falmouth. It was so near a thing, that the vessel sank almost before the last boat had shoved off from her side.

“Well,” said Birger, “if there is a selfish brute upon earth, it is an English sailor.”

“Natural enough that you should say so, just at present,” said the Captain; “though, as a Swede, you might have recollected the superstition that prevails in your own country against helping a drowning man. But the fact is, the fault lies not so much with the sailors as with the insurance regulations at Lloyds’. Likely enough, every one of these fellows has a desire to help us; but if they go one cable’s length from their course to do so, or if they stay one half-hour by us when they might have been making their way to their port, they vitiate their insurance. Man is a selfish animal, no doubt—sea-going man as well as shore-going man—and it is very possible that some of them would rather see their neighbours perish than lose the first of the market; but laws such as these render selfishness imperatively necessary to self-preservation, and banish humanity from the maritime code.”

“I wish all Lloyds’ were on the Shipwash,” said Birger, “and had to wait there till I picked them off.”

“Yes,” said the Captain; “or that the House of Commons were compelled to take a winter’s voyage every year in some of these company’s vessels. I think, then, they might possibly find out the advantage of certain laws and certain officers to see them put in force, in order to prevent their going to sea so wretchedly found. There is nothing like personal experience for these legislators. This vessel has not a boat bigger than a cockle-shell belonging to her. Did you not hear how nearly the Mate was lost last night,—and he is the only real sailor in the ship—when they were trying to lay out an anchor—a manœuvre which, I see, they have not accomplished yet?”

“Hallo! this is serious,” said Birger, as a heavy sea struck the weather paddle-box, and broke over them in spray: for the tide had been gradually rising, without, as yet, raising the ship; and, as she lay over to windward, the seas that now began to break upon her starboard bow and side, deluged her from stem to stern.

“Upon my soul,” said the Captain, “I don’t like this, myself; and there sits the Parson, fishing away, as quietly as if he were on the pier at Boveysand. By Jove, Nero fiddling while Rome was burning, is a fool to him! Why, Parson, don’t you think there is some danger in all this?”

“‘Er det noget Færde?’ as your friend the professor would say,” said the Parson, laughing. “I do not think it improbable that the Walrus will leave her bones here, if you mean that.—Stop, I’ve got another bite!”

“Confound your bite! If she leaves her bones here, we shall leave ours too; for she has not boats for the fourth of us, the devil take them! and as for expecting help from these rascally colliers——”

“You may just as well fiddle to the dolphins,” said the Parson. “I know that; but do you see that little cutter,—that fellow, I mean, on our quarter, that has just tacked? and there beyond her is another, that is now letting fly her jib-sheet. I have been watching those fellows all the morning, beating out from Harwich. They are having a race, and a beautiful race they make of it: you cannot tell yet which has the best of it. If those cutters were going over to the Dutch coast, you may depend upon it they would not make such short boards. There—look—the leading one is in stays again. Those fellows are racing for us, and with our ensign Union down, as we have it, we shall make a pretty good prize for the one that gets first to us. Those two are pilot-boats. You may depend upon it, we are not going to lay our bones here, whatever comes of the Walrus.”

The Parson’s anticipations were realised sooner than he expected, for a long low life-boat, that nobody had seen till she was close alongside, came up, carrying off the prize from both competitors—and preparations were begun, which ought to have been completed hours before, for laying out an anchor.

Before long, the cutters also had worked up and anchored on the lee edge of the shoal, to the great relief of every one on board; for the seas were by this time making such a breach over her, that no one could be ignorant of the danger.

Suddenly, and without preparation, she righted, throwing half the passengers off their legs, and very nearly precipitating the Parson into the sea; who took that as a hint to leave his seat in the dingy. Soon afterwards she began to bump, first lightly, and then more heavily, and the paddles were set in motion. The windlass was manned and worked; but the shifting sand afforded no good holding-ground for the anchor, which had not been backed—nor, indeed, had any precautions been taken whatever—and as soon as there was any strain upon it, it came home and was perfectly useless.

The ship now was hanging a little abaft the chess-tree, on the very top of the spit; but the stern was free, and the bows were actually in the deep water of the turnhole, while at every bump she gained an inch or two: just then, the anchor coming home, and the tide taking her under the port bow, she ran up in the wind, and pointed for the very centre of the shoal.

“Why the devil don’t you set your jib?” bellowed out the Captain, who had begun to get excited. “Where the deuce is that know-nothing Skipper of yours?”

“Upon my soul, sir, I do not know,” said the Mate, who was standing at the wheel, and was looking very anxiously forward.

“Then why don’t you go forward and set it yourself? We shall be on the main shoal in two minutes, if she floats.”

“I know it, sir,” said the Mate; “but I dare not leave my post. We shall all have to answer for this; and if I am not where the Skipper has placed me, he will throw the blame upon me.”

“Then, by George, I don’t care that for your Skipper. Come along, boys, we’ll run up the jib ourselves.”

And away he rushed, pushing and shouldering his way along the crowded decks, among idlers, and horses, and carriages, followed by his own party, and a good many of the foreigners also; till he emerged on the forecastle, when, throwing down the jib and fore-staysail hallyards from the bitts and clattering them on the deck, while the Parson went forward to see all clear, he called out to the Russian servants, who, wet and frightened, were cowering under the carriages—

“Here, you slaveys, come out of that—clappez-vous sur ceci—clap on here, you rascals—rousez-vous dehors de ces bulwarks. What the devil is Greek for ‘skulking?’”

Whether the Russians understood one word of the Captain’s French, or whether they would have understood one word of it had they been Frenchmen, may be doubted; but his actions were significant enough; and the men, who only wanted to be told what to do, clapped on to the jib and fore-staysail hallyards as well and as eagerly as if they had known what was to be done with them; here and there, too, was seen a blue-jacket, for the seamen had no wish to skulk, if there had been any one to command them.

“Gib mig ropes enden!” shouted Professor Rosenschall, who had caught the enthusiasm, and was panting after them, though a long way astern.

“Birger will do that for you,” said the Parson, laughing, but without pausing for one moment from his work—“Birger! the Professor wants a rope’s-end.”

“Vær saa artig!” said Birger, tendering him the signal hallyards, the bight of which he had hitched round a spare capstan-bar on which he was standing. For Birger, like most Swedish soldiers, had passed a twelvemonth in a midshipman’s berth, where, whatever seamanship he had picked up, he had, at all events, learned plenty of mischief.

“Away with you!” roared the Captain. “Up with the sails—both of them.”

“Skynda! Professor, Skynda!” echoed Birger, leaping off the capstan-bar as he spoke, and thus causing the Professor to pitch headlong among the trampling men.

“Up with it! up with it, cheerily! look there, she pays off already!” as the two sails flew out; the jib, which was not confined by any stay, bagging away to leeward and hanging there, but still drawing and doing good service. “Up with it, boys—round she comes, like a top! Hurrah, that’s elegant!” as a sea struck her full on the quarter, which, by her paying off, had now become exposed to it. On it came, breaking over the taffrail and deluging the idlers on the poop, but at the same time giving her the final shove off the ridge. “Off she goes! Shout, boys, shout! and wake up that Skipper, wherever he is!”

And amid the most discordant yells that ever proceeded from heterogeneous voices—Danish, Dutch, Swedish, German, and Russ, above which, distinct and ringing, rose the heart-stirring English cheer—the steamer, once more under command of her rudder, buzzed, and dashed her way into the open sea.

CHAPTER IV.
THE LANDFALL.

“Bewilderedly gazes

On the wild sea, the eagle

When he reaches the strand:

So is it with the man;

In the crowd he standeth

And hath but few friends there.”

Hávamál.

“Nothing gives one so lively an idea of eternal, irresistible progress—of steady, inexorable, unalterable fate, as the ceaseless grinding of these enormous engines.” Thus moralised Birger, as, two days after the events recorded in the last chapter, he stood with his brother officer, the Captain, on the grating that gave air into the engine-room. “In joy or in sorrow, in hope or in fear, on they go—grinding—grinding, never stopping, never varying, never hurrying themselves:—the same quiet, irresistible round over and over again: we go to bed—we leave them grinding; we get up—there they are, grinding still; we are full of hope, and joy, and expectancy, looking out for land and its pleasures—they go no faster; they would go no faster if we went to grief and misery. If you or I were to fall dead at this moment, the whole ship would be in an uproar, every man of them all showing his interest, or his curiosity, one way or other—but still would go on, through it all, that eternal, everlasting grinding.”

“Everlasting it is,” said the Captain, who was not at all poetical, and who was anxious to be at his journey’s end. “This steamer is the very slowest top I have ever had the misfortune to sail in. By every calculation we should have made the coast of Norway ages ago; I have been on the look out for it ever since daylight; but six, seven, eight, nine, and no coast yet. Breakfast over, and here are your everlasting wheels of fate grinding away, and not one bit nearer land, as far as I can see, than they were before. I’ll be hanged if the wind is not getting northerly too,” he said, looking up, as the fore and aft foresail over their head gave a flap, as if it would shake the canvas out of the bolt-ropes. “I thought so. Look at them brailing up the mainsail! wind and steam together, we never got seven knots out of this tub; I wonder what we shall get now—and the sea getting up too?”

Several consecutive pitches, which set the horses kicking, and prostrated one-half of the miserable, worn-out, dirty-looking deck passengers, seemed fully to warrant the Captain’s grumbling assertion, and they scrambled back to the poop; upon which most of the passengers were by this time congregated, for the sun was shining out brightly, and the wind, though there was plenty of it, was fresh and bracing.

They had evidently by this time opened the north of Scotland, for the slow, heaving swell of the Northern Ocean was rolling in upon them; and this, meeting the windwash knocked up by the last night’s south-easterly breeze, was making a terrible commotion in the ship, and everything and everybody belonging to it.

“Land! land!” shouted the Parson, who had climbed upon the weather bulwarks, and was holding on by the vang to steady his footing. “Land, I see it now; where could our eyes have been? There it is, like blue clouds rising out of the water.”

There was a general move and a general crowding towards the spot to which he was pointing, but just then the ship pitched bowsprit and bows under, jerking the Parson off his legs; upsetting every passenger who had nothing to hold on by, and submerging half-a-dozen men on the jib-boom, who were occupied in stowing the now useless jib. They rose from their involuntary bath puffing and blowing, and shaking the water from their jackets, but continuing their work as if nothing had happened.

There, however, was the land, beyond a doubt. No Cape Flyaway, but land—bold, decided, and substantial. Whether it was that people had not looked for it in the right direction, or had not known what to look for; or whether, as was most likely, a haze had hung over the morning sea, which the sun had now risen high enough to dispel; whatever was the cause, there stood the hitherto invisible land, speaking of hope and joy, and quiet dinners, and clean beds, and creating a soul under the ribs of sea-sickness.

Long, however, it was before they neared it,—hour after hour; and Birger’s everlasting wheels went grinding on, and the mountains seemed no higher and no plainer than they were when the Parson had first descried them. But the day had become much more enjoyable, the wind had moderated, and the swell was less felt, as the land began to afford some protection.

The Captain and his friend Birger had by this time established themselves on the break of the poop, with their sketch-books in their hands, nominally to sketch the outline of the land, really to caricature the Russian magnates during their hours of marine weakness. While Monsieur Simonet, one of the numerous tutors, a venturesome Frenchman, climbed warily up the main shrouds to get a better view, creeping up step by step, ascertaining the strength of each rattlin before he ventured his weight upon it, and holding on to the shrouds like grim Death. Quietly and warily stole after him the Mate, with a couple of stout foxes hitched round his left arm.

“Faith,” said Birger, “they are going to make a spread-eagle of him. Well, that is kind; it will prepare him for his new country; it is in compliment to Russia, I suppose, that they turn him into the national device.”

But the Mate had reckoned without his host. The Frenchman made a capital fight for it, and in the energy of his resistance, entirely forgot his precarious position; he kicked, he cuffed, he fought gallantly, and finally succeeded in seizing his adversary’s cap, a particularly jaunty affair with gold lace round it, in imitation of her Majesty’s navy, of which the Mate was especially proud. This, the Frenchman swore by every saint the Revolution had left in his calendar, he would heave overboard; and before the Captain had completed the little sketch he was taking of the transaction, a capitulation was entered into by the belligerents upon the principle of the statu quo, and the discomfited Mate descended, leaving his adversary to enjoy at once his position and his victory.

By this time sails, unseen before, had begun to dot the space which still intervened between the steamer and the iron-bound coast before it, which now rose stern and rugged, and desolately beautiful, clothed everywhere with a sort of rifle-green, from the dark hues of the fir and juniper, for none but the hardy evergreens could bear the severe blasts of even its southern aspect; few and far between were these sails at first, and insignificant did they seem under the abrupt and lofty mountains which rose immediately out of the sea, without any beach or coast-line, or low-land whatever; but, as they neared the land, the moving objects assumed a more conspicuous place in the landscape.

There was the great heavy galliasse with pigs from Bremen or colonial produce from Hamburg—a sort of parallelogram with the corners rounded, such as one sees in the pictures of the old Dutch school two hundred years ago—not an atom of alteration or improvement in its build since the days of old Van Tromp; the same flat floor and light draft of water—the same lumbering lee-boards—the same great, stiff, substantial, square-rigged foremast, with a little fore and aft mizen, which looked like an after-thought; she might be said to be harrowing the main instead of ploughing it, according to our more familiar metaphor, with a great white ridge of foam heaped up under her bows, and a broad, ragged wake like that of a steamer.

And there was the Norwegian brig returning from Copenhagen with a cargo of corn for Christiansand; rough and ill-found, nine times in ten not boasting so much as a foretop-gallant sail, yet tight and seaworthy, and far better than she looked; built after the model of a whale’s body, full forward and lean aft, with a stern so narrow that she looked as if she had been sailing through the Symplegades, and had got pinched in the transit.

Then came a fleet of a dozen jagts from the north, the tainted breezes advertising their fishy cargo, as they came along. These were the originals of the English yacht, which unspellable word is merely the Norwegian jagt, written as it is pronounced in the country, for Norway is the only nation besides England that takes its pleasure on the deep sea. With their single great unwieldy sails, their tea-tray-shaped hulls, and towering sterns, they looked like a boy’s first essays in the art of ship-building.

But Bergen furnishes a far more ship-shape description of craft—sharp fore and aft vessels are the Bergeners, looking as if they had all been built on the same lines, with little, low bulwarks, and knife-like cutwaters, as if they were intended to cut through the seas rather than to ride over them, sailing almost in the wind’s eye, and, when very close hauled indeed, a point on the other side of it—at least, so their skippers unanimously assert, and they ought to know best,—at all events, ensuring a wet jacket to every one on board, be the weather as fine as it may, from the time they leave the port to the time they return to it.

Then came, crowding all sail and looking as if they were rigged for a regatta, with their butterfly summer gear and tapering spars, the lobster smacks from Lyngör, and Osterisö, and Arendahl, and Hellesund: and a regatta it was on a large scale, with the wide North Sea for a race-course, omnivorous London for the goal, and its ever-fluctuating markets for a prize. These were sharp, trim-looking vessels, admirably handled, and not unworthy of a place in the lists of any Royal Yacht Club for beauty or for speed; somewhat less sharp, perhaps, than the Bergeners, but scarcely less weatherly or sitting less lightly on the seas.

The near approach to the land, which had been for so many hours looked for in vain, seemed to bring no great comfort to the unfortunate Skipper, who kept fidgetting about the decks with a perplexed and anxious countenance. Glasses were brought on deck, and rubbed and polished over and over again, and directed in succession to every mountain peak that showed itself, and every inlet that opened before them. Then, little mysterious consultations were held between the Skipper and his First Mate; then, one man was sent for, then another; then more whispering, and more mystery, more shaking of the heads and examination of charts; then an adjournment to the bridge, on which the Parson was then standing, taking his survey of the craft in sight, and enjoying the sunshine. At last, the whispering took a more objurgatory tone; more in the way of a growl, with now and then a short, emphatic sentence of eternal condemnation on somebody’s eyes, or blood, or other personalities,—as is the custom of those who “go down to the sea in ships.”

The first distinct words which met the Parson’s ear, came from the lips of the Skipper, pronounced in a sharp, acid, querulous sort of tone; such as superiors sometimes indulge in, when they are fixing on the shoulders of an inferior the blame they shrewdly suspect all the while, ought, if justice had its due, to rest on their own.

“You are not worth your salt, sir,” he said; “you are not worth your salt—you ought to be ashamed of wearing a blue jacket, you know-nothing, lubberly ...” and so forth; expressions by no means unusual at sea, certainly, but sounding somewhat misplaced in the present instance, inasmuch as if there was any one in the whole ship not worth his salt, the speaker certainly was the man, in his own proper person.

“Upon my soul, sir,” said the man addressed, “if I tried to tell you anything about it, I should be only deceiving you. I know the coast about Christiansand as well as any man. I have traded to that port for years, and taken the old brig in and out twenty times; but the land before us is all strange to me. I never saw those three hummocky hills before in my life. This is not Christiansand.”

“Well, but if it is not, does Christiansand lie east or west of us—which way am I to steer?”

The man raised his glass again, and took a long and anxious survey, but apparently with no better result.

“Really, sir, I cannot say. I cannot make it out at all; there is not one single sea-mark that I know.”

“Then what the devil did you ship for as a pilot, if you knew nothing of your business?” Here followed another strong detachment of marine expletives.

“I shipped as a pilot for Christiansand, sir; and, for the Sound, and for Copenhagen; and can take the steamer into any one of them, if she drew as much as a first-rate; but this place is neither one nor the other of them, and I never called myself a coasting pilot.”

“Well,” said the Parson, “this seems to me sad waste of breath and temper; if you are a couple of lost babes, why do you not ask your way? There lies a pilot-boat, as you may see with your own eyes,” pointing to a little cutter exhibiting in the bright sunshine a single dark cloth in a very white mainsail, which, with her foresheet to windward, lay bobbing about in the swell right ahead of them. “That is a pilot-boat, and I suppose she knows the way, if you do not—why do you not hail her?”

The Skipper looked askance at the Parson, as if he meditated some not very complimentary reply about minding one’s own business; for, conscious of the estimation in which he was himself held by the fishing party, who were in no way chary of their remarks, he regarded them with anything but friendly feelings. But the advice was too obviously sound to be neglected, and the Skipper was not by any means anxious that the magnates on the poop should become acquainted with the fact that he was at sea in more senses than one.

In a few minutes the steamer was alongside the little shrimp of a cutter, taking the wind out of her sails by her huge unwieldy hull.

A short conversation passed between them, which as one-half was sworn down the wind in very loud English, and the other half came struggling up in broad Norske, was not attended with any very satisfactory results.

Birger offered his services.

“You may as well ask them what they will take us into Christiansand for,” said the Skipper; “that will soon make them find their English.”

A few more unintelligible words were exchanged, and Birger burst out laughing.

“They cannot do it,” he said: “they cannot take us into Christiansand: not only they are not able, but they are not licensed to ply so far.”

“Why! where are we, then?” said the astonished Skipper.

“Off Arendahl!” said Birger.

“Arendahl!” broke in the Parson, “why, that is fifty miles to the westward of your course.”

“Well, I cannot conceive how that can be,” said the Skipper. “Something wrong, I am afraid, with the compasses. We ought not to be so far out; we steered a straight course, and—”

“That did you not,” said Birger, “whatever else you did; the Captain and I have been studying the theory of transcendental curves from your wake.”

“I can tell you how it is,” said the Parson; “you have steered your course as you say, and have not allowed for the easterly set of the current, and you imagine how this must have acted upon us under the influence of these rolling swells which we have had on our port bow ever since daylight, every one of which must have set us down a fathom or two to leeward. Don’t you recollect that we lost three line-of-battle ships coming home from the Baltic by this very blunder. Compasses!” he continued, sotto voce, “a pretty lot of blunders are thrown on those unfortunate compasses, in every court-martial. However,” he continued, aloud, “there is no help for it,—thankful ought we to be it is no worse; there is but one thing to be done now, and what that one thing is, you know as well as I.”

This the Skipper did know. A close survey of the remaining coals took place, and it was decided that notwithstanding the expenditure that took place on the day on the Shipwash, there might, with economy, be enough for six hours’ consumption, Birger inquiring innocently, “whether the Skipper had not anything that would burn in his own private stores?”

The steamer’s course was accordingly altered nine or ten points, for the coast from Arendahl to Christiansand trends southerly, and she had actually overshot her mark, and gone to the northward as well as to the eastward of her port, so that land which had hitherto lain before them, was thus brought abaft the starboard beam.

To those who, like our fishermen, were not exactly making a passage, but exploring the country, and to whom it was a matter of indifference whether they dined at five or supped at eleven, the Skipper’s blunder was anything but an annoyance. It afforded them an opportunity, not often enjoyed, of seeing the outside coast of Norway; for in general, almost all the coasting trade, and all the passenger traffic, is carried on within the fringe of islands that guard the shores. An absolute failure in the article of fuel, and a week or so of calm within a few miles of their port, might have been a trial to their tempers; but there was no such temptation to grumbling on the present occasion; and, besides, the afternoon and evening were bright and warm, the wind had sunk to a calm, and though the ever restless sea was heaving and setting, the swells had become glassy, soft, and regular.

Cape after cape, island after island of that inhospitable coast was passed, and not a sign of habitation, not a town, not a village, not even a fisherman’s cottage, or a solitary wreath of smoke was to be seen. The land seemed utterly uninhabited, and, as they drew out from the stream of trade, the very sea seemed tenantless also.

The fact is, that the whole coast of Norway, and of Sweden also, is fringed with islands, in some places two or three deep, which are separated from the main and from each other by channels more or less broad, but always deep. Of these islands, the outer range is seldom inhabited at all, never on the seaward sides, which, exposed to the first sweep of the southwester, are either bare, bold rocks, or else nourish on their barren crags a scanty clothing of stunted fir or ragged juniper, but afford neither food nor shelter, and where that necessary of life, fresh water, is very rarely to be met with.

The whole of the coasting trade passes within this barrier, and the houses and villages, of which there are many, lie hidden on the sheltered shores of the numerous channels; so that, however well peopled the coast may be—and in some places population is by no means scanty—neither house, nor boat, nor ship, except the foreign trade as it approaches or leaves the coast, is ever seen by the outside coaster.

The shades of evening were already falling, and that at midsummer in Norway indicates a very late hour indeed, when the glimmer of a light was seen through the scrubby firs of a cape-land island, occasioning a general rush of expectant passengers to the bridge, for some had begun to doubt the very possibility of discovering this continually retreating port, and to class it with the fairy territories of Cloudland and Cape Flyaway; while others, with more practical views and less poetical imaginations, had been contemplating with anxiety the rapidly decreasing coals in the bunkers. Both parties, poets and utilitarians alike, had their fears set at rest when, on rounding the point, the long-lost lighthouse of Christiansand hove in sight—tall, white, pillar-like, looking shadowy and ghost-like, against the dark background behind it. The poets might have thought of the guardian spirit of some ancient sea king, permitted to watch over the safety of his former dwelling-place, for Christiansand is renowned in story. To the utilitarians it might, and probably did, suggest visions of fresh vegetables, and salmon, and cod, and lobsters, for all of which that town is famous.

A bare, low, treeless slab of rock forms its site, a mere ledge, about a quarter-of-a-mile long, and sufficiently low, and sufficiently in advance of the higher islands, to form in itself a danger of no small magnitude during the long winter nights. It maintains on its withered wiry grass half-a-dozen sheep and a pig or two, the property of the lighthouse-keeper, which being the first signs of life and vestiges of habitation which had greeted the travellers during the afternoon’s steaming, were regarded with an interest of which they were not intrinsically deserving.

In a very few minutes, the heaving of the outside sea was exchanged for the perfect calm and deep stillness of the harbour, with its overhanging woods, its long dusky reaches, its quiet inlets, and mysterious labyrinthine passages, among its dark, shadowy islands. These became higher and more wooded as the steamer wound her way among them, deepening the gloom, and bringing on more rapidly the evening darkness. All, however, looked deserted and uninhabited, till suddenly, on opening a point of land, high and wooded like all the rest, the town of Christiansand lay close before them, dark and indistinct in the midnight twilight, without the twinkle of a solitary lamp to enliven it, or to indicate the low houses from the rocks which surrounded and were confused with them.

“Hurrah!” said the Parson, as the plunge of the anchor and the rattle of the chain cable broke the stillness of the night. “Some of us are not born to be drowned, that is certain.”

CHAPTER V.
CHRISTIANSAND.

“Dark it is without,

And time for our going.”

Skirnis Fär.

At the time the Walrus dropped her anchor, all seemed as still and lonely as if no sound had ever awakened the silence of the harbour. The chain cable, as it rattled through the hawse-hole, had even a startling effect, so solitary, so unusual was the sound. The place seemed as if it had been uninhabited since creation; for though the town lay close before it, the houses, low and lightless, looked like a collection of fantastic rocks; but scarcely had she felt the strain of her cable, when her stern swung into the middle of a group of boats, which seemed as if they had risen from the depths of the sea, so sudden and unexpected was their appearance, and crowds of earnest, business-like, trafficing Norsemen were clambering up her sides at every practical point. Norway has no inns, and Norway is said to be a place of universal hospitality, where every one is delighted to receive the wandering guest—and so every one is, and delighted to receive the wandering guest’s money also, with two or three hundred per cent. profit on the outlay. The real fact is, every house in Norway is an inn, to all intents and purposes, except the license; and in places like Christiansand, every man is his own touter. Whatever is the noise and confusion of a vessel arriving at a French or Flemish port, on this occasion it was doubled, not only from the number and assiduity of hospitable hosts, but also from the unusual quantity and quality of the passengers. It was not every day that a Russian ambassador graced with his august presence, and his distinguished suite, an obscure trading town of Norway; and its citizens, inferior to no nation in the world in the art of turning an honest penny, were in two moments as well aware of the fact, and as fully determined to profit by it, as the Dutch landlady, who, having charged our second George the value of ten pounds sterling English for his two eggs and his bit of toast, informed him that though eggs were plentiful in her country, kings were not.

The confusion which pervaded the Walrus’s decks and cabins, the cries, the calls, the screams that were flying about unheeded; the extraordinary oaths that jostled one another, out of every language of Saxon, Russian, or Scandinavian origin; the obtrusive civilities of the touters; the officiousness of volunteering porters; the mistakes about luggage; the anxieties, the rushings to and fro, in which everybody is seeking for everybody, may easily be imagined; and none the less was the confusion of tongues; that night had thrown her veil over this floating Babel of the North.

But through it all the three friends sat on their carpet bags of patience, smoking the cigar of peace, now and then making a joke among themselves, as the steward’s lantern flashed upon some face of unusual solicitude, but totally unconcerned amid the fluctuating hubbub that surrounded them.

“Well,” said the Captain, “I have had enough of this fun, and am hungry besides; I vote we go on shore. I suppose your man is here?”

The Parson got up, and, putting his head over the side, shouted in a stentorian voice, through his hand, which he used as a speaking trumpet—“Ullitz! Ullitz!”

“Hulloh!” returned a voice from the dark waters, in the unmistakably English man-of-war’s fashion—“Hulloh!” repeated the voice.

“Shove alongside here, under the quarter,” said the Parson. “Who have you got in the boat along with you? Tom Engelsk for one, I am sure.”

“Only Tom and Torkel; I thought that would be enough,” said a voice from the waters below, in remarkably good English, in which the foreign accent was scarcely perceptible.

“Quite enough,” said the Parson; “look out there!” as he hove the slack of the quarter-boat’s after-tackle fall, which he had been making up into coils as he was speaking. “Tell English Tom to shin up that, and come on board: it is nothing for an English man-of-war’s man to do, and one of you hold on by the rope.”

Tom, active as a cat, and delighted at being spoken of as an English man-of-war’s man before so many English people, scrambled up the side and stood before them, with his shallow tarpaulin hat in hand, as perfectly an English sailor, so far as his habiliments were concerned, as if he had dressed after the model of T. P. Cooke.

The man’s real name was Thorsen, and his birthplace the extreme wilds of the Tellemark; but having served for five years on board an English man-of-war, he had dropped his patronymic, and delighted in the name of English Tom; by which, indeed, he was generally known.

“Tom,” said the Parson, “you see to this luggage; count all the parcels; see that you have it all safe; pass it through the custom-house, and let us see you and it to-morrow morning. And now, he who is for a good supper, a smiling hostess, a capital bottle of wine, and clean sheets, follow me.”

As he spoke, he dropped his carpet bag over the side which Ullitz caught, and disappeared down the rope by which Tom had ascended, followed implicitly by his two companions.

“Shove off, Ullitz,” said he, as the Captain sat himself down and poised Tom’s oar in his hands, pointing it man-of-war fashion as Tom himself would have done, and when Ullitz had got clear of the steamer, seconding ably the sturdy strokes of Torkel. In a few moments the boat touched the quay of the fish market, and the party sprang on shore with all the glee that shore-going people feel when released from the thraldom of a crowded vessel.

Ullitz and Torkel remained behind, in order to secure the boat in some dark nook best known to themselves; for there were several idlers on the fish-market quay, who, except for want of conveyance, would have been at that moment unnecessarily adding to the crowd on board, and were not very likely to be over-scrupulous about Torkel’s private property.

The three friends, in the meanwhile, in order to extricate themselves from two or three groups of drunken men (drunkenness, the Parson remarked, was the normal state of Norway, at that time of night), pressed forward, and walked ankle-deep through the sandy desert, which, in Christiansand, is called a street, the Captain stuffing the little black pipe which, as was his wont, he carried in his waistcoat pocket.

“Well,” said Birger, “no one can appreciate a blessing until he has been deprived of it. I declare, it is a luxury in itself to be able to go where one pleases, after having been cribbed and cabined and confined as we have been, and to plant one’s feet on the solid earth once more, instead of balancing our steps on a dancing plank.”

“Pretty well, to call this solid earth,” said the Captain; “I should call it decidedly marine.”

“Something like the Christiansanders themselves,” said Birger, “who, as all the world knows, are neither fish nor flesh, nor good red-herring; but I dare say Purgatory would be Paradise to those who arrived at it from the other way. Well, what is the matter? what are you stopping about?”

These last words were addressed to the Parson, who having been sent forward on the previous summer to spy out this Land of Promise, had volunteered to act as guide.

“If there is one thing more puzzling than another,” said he, “it is this rectangular arrangement of streets. I wish those utilitarian Yankees, who claim the invention, had it all to themselves. It is fit only for them.”

“The English of that is, you have lost your way,” said the Captain.

“No, not lost my way,” said the Parson, who piqued himself on his organ of locality; “but the fact is, I cannot remember, in the dark, which of all these rectangular crossings is the right one. I wish I could see that great lump of a church they are so proud of. I say, Birger, knock up some one, and ask ‘if Monsieur Tonson lodges there.’”

“Not I,” said Birger. “You are the guide; besides, they must be coming ashore, some of them, from the steamer by this time; and, in good truth, here are a couple of them.”

This couple, much to their relief, turned out to be Ullitz and Torkel, who pointed out the road at once, but looked rather grave at the Captain’s pipe, which was now sending forth a bright red glow through the darkness, and occasionally illuminating a budding moustache which he was cultivating on the strength of being a military man.

Had the acquaintance been of longer standing, they possibly would have spoken out; as it was, they contented themselves with a muttered dialogue in their own language, in which the Parson soon made out the words, “Tobacco” and “Police,” both of which being modern inventions, bear nearly the same name in every language in Europe.

“By the by, I had forgotten that,” said he. “Captain, I am sorry to put your pipe out; but the fact is, you must not smoke.”

“Not smoke! why not?”

“For fear you should set fire to the town,” said the Parson,—“that is all. You need not laugh; the law is very strict about it, I can tell you.”

The Captain did burst out laughing; and, in truth, where they were standing, it seemed a ridiculous law enough, though it is pretty general both in Norway and Sweden. The street was one of unusual width, being one expanse of sand from side to side, and the houses, none of which boasted a storey above the ground floor, seemed absurdly distant,—almost indistinct in the darkness.

The Captain, however, obediently put his pipe into its receptacle, and resumed his route, muttering something about Warner and the long range—his estimate of the Norwegian legislative capacity being in no way raised by the sight of certain small tubs of very dirty water standing by the side of every house door, which the Parson informed him was another precaution against fire.

“Whether there really is to be found any one, well authenticated instance of a town being set on fire by a pipe of tobacco,” said Birger, “I will not take it upon myself to say, nor whether legislating upon pipes and leaving kitchen fires to take care of themselves, be not like guarding the spigot and forgetting the bung; but the fires here, when they do occur, are really awful. You talk in your country of twenty or thirty houses as something; we burn a town at a time. Everything here is of deal, every bit of this deal is painted, and in a season like this, everything you meet with is as dry as tinder, and heated half-way to the point of combustion already. Hark to that!” as a sharp, startling crack sounded close by them; “that is the wood strained and expanded by the roasting heat of a long summer’s day, yielding now to the change of temperature; we shall have plenty of these towards morning. Light up but one of these little bonfires of houses in a moderate breeze, and see how every house in the town will be burning within half-an-hour. Six months ago, the capital of my own province, Wenersborg, contained 10,000 inhabitants, and I believe now the church and the post-house are the only two buildings left in it.”

Here Ullitz, who was leading, came to a dead halt before a substantial porch containing wood enough to build a ship, from the open door of which a bright light was streaming across the street. Taking off his hat—every Norwegian is continually taking off his hat to everybody and everything—he made a profound bow to the party in general, and with the words, “Vær saa artig,” ushered them into the house.

The room into which they entered was long and low, the ceiling supported by a mass of timbers like the decks of a ship; every part of it was planked with bright deal,—floor, walls, and roof alike,—putting one something in mind of the inside of a deal box. It was, however, well furnished with birchen tables, birchen sofas chairs and cabinets (for birch is a wood that takes a high polish), the whole having rather a French look. The floor was uncarpeted, as is the case in almost all Norwegian houses, for they have no carpet manufactory of their own, and the duty upon English woollens is so enormous that it is impossible to import them; but it was strewed with sprigs of green juniper, which diffused a pleasant fragrance; and these, in token that the family were keeping holiday, were spangled with the yellow heads of the trollius europæus, which the pretty Marie, the daughter of the house, had been gathering all the morning, and had scattered over them in honour of the expected guests.

Neither Marie nor her mother could speak one word of English—few of their women can—but their deeds spoke for them; for the hospitable board—and in this case it was literally a board, placed upon trestles, and removed when the supper was over—groaned under the weight of the good cheer. There were fish, not only in every variety, but in every variety of cookery; there was lobster-soup, and plok fiske, and whiting cakes, and long strips of bright red salmon, highly dried in juniper smoke and served up raw; enormous bowls of gröd,—a name which signifies everything semi-liquid, from rye-stirabout to gooseberry-fool;—with cream, as if the whole dairy was paraded at once,—some of it pure, some tinged with crimson streaks, from the masses of cranberry jelly that floated about it.

Nor were the liquors forgotten, which, in Norway, at least, are considered indispensable to qualify such delicacies. There was the corn brandy of the country, diffusing round it a powerful flavour of aniseed, without which no meal of any kind takes place; there, too, was French brandy, freely partaken of, but so light both in colour and taste, that it suggested ideas of a large qualification of water; there was English beer, and a light sort of clarety wine, that was drunk in tumblers. Madame Ullitz, indeed, presided over a marshalled array of tea-cups, of which she was not a little proud, for it is not every house that can boast of its tea equipage; but this was as an especial compliment to the English strangers. The tea-cups and saucers might be Staffordshire,—they had a most English look about them; but the tea was unquestionably of native growth, being little else than a decoction of dried strawberry leaves, not at all unpleasant, but by no means coming up to English ideas of tea.

“Vær saa artig,” said the lady of the house, with an inviting smile and a general bow, intimating that supper was ready; and the whole household and guests of various degrees, including Torkel the hunter, and Jacob the courier, and two or three stout serving-girls, and half-a-dozen hangers-on of one sort or other, placed themselves round the table, as indiscriminately as the viands upon it.

The house of Ullitz made a feast that day.

“Vær saa artig,” said Marie, handing to the Captain a plate heaped up with brown, crisp, crackling whiting cakes.

The Captain did his best to look his thanks as he took the plate. “What on earth do they all mean by that eternal ‘Vær saa artig?’” said he to the Parson, aside. “I have heard nothing else ever since we dropped our anchor. First, I thought it meant ‘Get out of the boat,’ or ‘Go up the street,’ or ‘Come in-doors,’ or ‘Sit down to supper,’ or something of that sort; but then those drunken porters on board were shoving and elbowing one another about with the very same words in their mouths; and, now I recollect, this was the very speech Birger made to the Professor on the day of the wreck, when he gave him that slippery hitch.”

“In that case,” said the Parson, laughing, “‘vær saa artig’ must mean two black eyes and a bloody nose, for that, as you know, is what the Professor got by it. But the fact is, ‘Vær saa artig,’ with variations, is the general passport throughout all Scandinavia. Some writers ascribe a mystic force to the words, ‘Vackere lilla flycka’—pretty little girl; and I am sure I am not going to deny the force of flattery. But among the natives, certainly, no one ever thinks of telling you what they want you to do. ‘Have another slice of beef?’ ‘Come in?’ ‘Take off your hat?’ ‘Take a seat?’ or whatever it is; all that is dumb show, preceded by the universal formula, ‘Vær saa artig,’ ‘Be so polite.’ All the rest is understood.”

“Vær saa artig,” said Ullitz, unconsciously, from the other end of the table, holding up a bottle of claret, from which he had just extracted the cork.

“Jag har äran drikka er till,” replied the Parson, who had picked up some of the formularies during his former visit. “There,” he said, “that is another instance: an Englishman would have said, ‘Take a glass of wine,’ in plain English. He holds me a bottle, and tells me to ‘be polite.’ My belief is, that when Jack Ketch goes to hang a man in Norway, he is not such a brute as to tell him to put his head into the halter; he merely holds it up to him, and, with a bow, requests him ‘Att være saa artig.’”

“Yes,” said Birger, breaking in, “that is very true; it used to be the case; but the Storthing has abolished that piece of politeness, and capital punishment along with it. The fact is, the Norwegians are so virtuous now, as everybody knows, that they never want hanging.”

This sarcasm, which was spoken in a little louder tone than the conversation which preceded it, threatened rather to interfere with the harmony of the evening, which it probably would have done had the language been generally understood. But the Parson acted as peace-maker.

“Now, Ullitz,” said he, not giving that worthy time to reply, “tell us what arrangements you have been making for us. Shall we be able to start to-morrow?”

“I have done everything according to the instructions transmitted to me,” said Ullitz, speaking like a secretary of state, and with the solemnity warranted by the importance of his subject. “There are two boats now lying at the bridge quay, with their oars and sails in my porch, and we can easily get another for the foreign gentleman” (so Ullitz designated his Swedish fellow-countryman—a little trait of Norske nationality at which Birger laughed heartily). “As for boat furniture, we have everything you can possibly want, in the shop; you have but to choose. And as for provisions, we may trust Madame Ullitz for that.”

“Yes,” said the Parson, “I know Madame Ullitz and her provision-baskets of old.”

Madame smiled, and looked pleased; making a guess that something was said about her, and that that something must be complimentary.

“Then, as for attendants, I made bold to detain this most excellent and well-born Gothenburger, Herr Jacob Carlblom”—(with a polite bow to Mr. Jacob, returned by a still more polite bow from that illustrious and well-born individual). “Herr Jacob is a traveller of some celebrity by sea and land”—(the Parson afterwards found out that he was a Gothenborg smuggler)—“and would be happy to attend the gentlemen in the capacity of courier, cook, interpreter, and commissary, for the remuneration of a specie-daler per diem, with his food and travelling expenses.”

“Very well,” said the Parson; “I suppose we must have a cook, so we will try your friend Mr. Jacob in our expedition up the Torjedahl, and see how we like him. And what says Torkel? are we to have the benefit of his experience?”

Torkel looked as if earth could afford no higher pleasure, for, in his way, he was a mighty hunter—he was not only great at the Långref,[2] and skilled in circumventing the Tjäder[3] in his lek, but he had followed the Fjeld Ripa[4] to the very tops of the snowy mountains, had prepared many a pitfall for the wolf and fox, and had been more than once in personal conflict with the great Bruin himself.

“Torkel shall be my man, then,” said the Parson, who had a pretty good eye to his own interest.

“And English Tom, who speaks the language so well, will be just the man for the highborn Captain,” said Ullitz.

“Very good,” said the Parson, “so be it; and whenever we have to do with lakes and sailing, Tom shall be our admiral, and shall put in practice all the science he has learned in the British navy.”

“Tom is as proud of belonging to the English navy, as if it were the Legion of Honour,” said Ullitz, whose father had belonged to the French faction, and who was rather suspected of holding French politics himself.

“It is the Legion of Honour,” said Birger, “and I give Mr. Tom great credit for his sentiments. Well, you must look me out a man, too. This will not be so very difficult, as I speak the language pretty well for a foreigner.”

In fact, Birger had been practising the language a good deal already, and not a little to the Captain’s envy, by making fierce love to the daughter of the house; an amusement with which guardsmen, Swedish as well as English, do occasionally beguile their leisure moments; and, to the Captain’s infinite disgust, Marie did not seem to lend by any means an unfavourable ear to his soft speeches.

“Oh,” said Ullitz, “we shall have no difficulty whatever in finding a man; if there is anything these people love better than gain, it is pleasure, and here we have both combined. My only difficulty lies in making the selection. I have reckoned that each of the highborn gentlemen will want a boatman besides his own man; but I have engaged these only for the trip to Wigeland, as you will no doubt like to change them there for men who are acquainted with the upper river; but you can keep them if you like, they will be but too happy to go.”

“All right, then, we will start to-morrow afternoon, and get as far as Oxea before we sleep. The morning, I suppose, must be devoted to hearing Tom’s report from the Custom-house, making our selections for the trip, arranging our heavy baggage that we are to leave here, and seeing that our outfit is all right. I like to make a short journey the first day, in order that if anything is forgotten, it may be sent back for.”

“Not at all a bad general maxim,” said the Captain: “and now to bed; for the broad daylight is already putting out the blaze even of Madame Ullitz’s candles.”

“With all my heart,” said the Parson, “it is high time;” and rising from his seat and going round to where Madame Ullitz sat, he took her hand, and bowing low, said, “Tak for mad”—thanks for the meal.

“Vel de bekomme,” said the lady,—well may it agree with you.

In this ceremony he was followed by the whole party, who, shortly after separating, sought their respective sleeping-places.

The beds were queer concerns, certainly: beautifully clean, and fragrant with all manner of wild herbs; but as unlike the English notion of a bed (which in that country is always associated with ideas of a recumbent position), as is well possible. A thick, straw mattress, shaped like a wedge, occupied the upper half. Upon this were placed two enormous pillows, fringed with lace. The rest of the bed was simply a feather-bed placed on the ticking, and so much lower, that the sleeper takes his rest almost in a sitting position. The whole, including the quilt, was stuffed luxuriously, not with feathers, but with the very best eider-down; for Madame Ullitz, in her maiden days, had been at least as celebrated a beauty as her daughter was now, and unnumbered had been the offerings of eider-down made by her hosts of admirers, who had braved wind and wave to procure for her that most acceptable of all presents to a Norwegian girl—at once the record of her past triumphs, and the glory of her future home. The prudent traveller in Norwegian territories will always do well, if he has the chance, to choose for his residence the house of a ci-devant beauty.

Little, however, did the travellers reck of mattress or feather-bed, Madame Ullitz’s past conquests, or her daughter’s present bright eyes—a sea-voyage, four or five restless nights, a long day’s work, and a plentiful supper at the end of it, equalize all those things; and, though the sun was shining brightly through the shutterless and curtainless windows, five minutes had not elapsed before it was indifferent to them whether they had sunk to rest on eider-down or poplar leaves; or whether their beds had been strewed for them by the fair hands of the bright-eyed Marie, or by those of the two lumps of girls who had assisted at the grand supper.

CHAPTER VI.
THE TORJEDAHL.

“Foresight is needful

To the far traveller:

Each place seems home to him:

Least errs the cautious.”

Hávamál.

“And now for work,” said the Parson, as, somewhat late on the following morning they rose from a breakfast as substantial and plentiful as had been the supper of the night before. The ordinary meals of a Norwegian are, in fact, three good substantial dinners per diem, with their proportionate quantity of strong drink: one at nine or ten, which they call “Frökost”; one at two or three, which is termed “Middagsmad”; and one in the evening, called “Afton.” But, whatever they call them, the fare is precisely the same in all; the same preliminary glass of brandy, the same very substantial hot joints, the same quantity of sweetmeats, and, at Christiansand at all events, the same liberal supply of fish. Tea and coffee are not seen at any of them, but generally form an excuse for supernumerary meals an hour or so after the grand ones.

The strangers were not yet acclimated; they lounged over their morning’s meal as if the recollections of their yesterday’s supper were yet green in their memories. Not so the natives. No one would suppose that they had supped at all—they ate as if they had been fasting for a week.

All things, however, come to an end,—even a Norwegian’s breakfast; and the Parson stood in the porch receiving English Tom’s report from the custom-house, and cataloguing the packages as they arrived. These included two dogs; one a very handsome brindled bay retriever, called “Grog,” belonging to the Captain; the other an extremely accomplished poaching setter, his own friend and constant companion. These, wild with joy at their newly regained liberty and restoration to their respective masters, from whose society they had been separated during the whole voyage, were grievously discomposing the economy of Madame Ullitz’s well-ordered house.

A small assortment of necessaries was packed in deal covered baskets or boxes,—for they looked as much like the one as the other. This manufacture is peculiar to the country, and is equally cheap and convenient. These, with the rods, guns, ammunition, and boat furniture, including the sails which were to form tents on the occasion, together with Madame Ullitz’s liberal supply of provisions (among which the rö kovringer were not forgotten), were arranged in the porch, and one by one were transferred by the boatmen to the bridge quay, where the boats were lying. The weightier articles were consigned to the keeping of Ullitz, and were lodged in his ample store rooms.

“Now, Captain,” said the Parson, as they stood on the bank of the noble river, “do you take a spare boat and a couple of hands, and pull as far as the first rapids; let Torkel be one of them, and he will show you the place. There is on the left bank of the river, a sort of rude boat canal, which is not always passable. If we can contrive to get through it, we will sleep at Oxea to-night: but, if the boats require to be hauled over land, we must be satisfied with that for one day’s work, return here to sleep, and carry our things over land to-morrow morning. It will take me a couple of hours, at the least, to fit these things, but I shall be ready for you by the time you return. And, to tell you the truth,” he added, in a whisper, “I wish you could take Birger with you. He is doing nothing but laugh and joke; and he makes the men so idle, that I shall get on twice as well without him. Set him to harl for salmon—anything, to get rid of him. It will be of use, too; for if he meet with anything down here we may be sure that Wigeland is alive with fish. You will see a reef of rocks on the right bank, a quarter of a mile above the town: it is not a bad throw—set him to work there.”

Birger was delighted at the idea, and, as the Parson would spare none of the boats or boatmen, he took a small praam that belonged to one of the men, and prepared to accompany the Captain on his expedition.

Birger certainly was no fisherman: he could but just throw a clumsy fly, and had never caught a salmon in his life, or seen one, except at table: but harling is a science open to the meanest capacity. It is the manner in which cockney sportsmen catch their salmon in the Tweed, and consists of traversing and re-traversing the width of the river, with a rod and twenty yards of line hanging out of the stern of the boat. The fly thus quarters the water backwards and forwards without any exertion of the fisherman, and even the salmon that seizes it effectually hooks itself before the rod can be taken in hand. On the Tweed, the fisherman has actually nothing to do, but to pay his boatmen, who, by choosing their own course, perform the very little science which this operation requires. In the present case, Birger, having to manage his own boat, was far more the artificer of his own fortune; but his success depended on his skill, not as a fisherman, but as a boatman—an accomplishment in which no Northman is deficient,—rather than on his science and dexterity as a fisherman.

As soon as the exploring party had left, the Parson, with his lieutenant and interpreter, Tom, and the remaining three boatmen, addressed himself seriously to work. Every Norseman is a carpenter; indeed, every Norseman may be set down as a Jack-of-all-trades; and under Tom’s interpretership they very soon began to understand what was wanted.

Under the starboard gunnel of each boat, and close to the right-hand of the sitter, were screwed two copper brackets for the gun, protected by a short curtain of waterproof. On the opposite side was a sort of shelf or ledge for the spare rods; and in the stern-sheets a locker for books, reels, powder-flasks, odds and ends, and, above all, any little store of brandy that they had,—an article which it was very dangerous indeed to have loose in the boat.

Norwegian boats are built like whale boats, with both ends alike, which is not altogether a convenient build for harling—a mode of fishing, which, however much to be deprecated in known rivers, is very useful, indeed almost indispensable, to explorers. To remedy this, a ring and socket was fixed on each quarter of the boat, in order to receive the butt of the rod, and to hold it in an upright position when the fishermen should be otherwise engaged. Under the thwarts of each boat were strapped an axe, a handbill, a hammer, and a bag of nails; and several coils of birch rope were stowed forward. Birch rope, which is a Swedish manufacture from the tough roots of the birch tree, is peculiarly adapted to these purposes, since it has the property of floating on the water, which hempen ropes have not.

Upon the principle of “business first and pleasure afterwards,” so long as anything remained to be done, the Parson had scarcely raised his eyes from his work, or thought of anything else; and so well and so ably had he been seconded, that everything was completely fitted, provisions brought down and stowed, and all ready for starting, a full half-hour before the time specified. His friends were, however, still absent; and thus, having nothing to do, he left the men to take care of the boats, and lounged across the beautiful bridge that connects the town with the opposite shore.

The bridge of Christiansand may well be called beautiful; not, indeed, as a piece of architecture, for it is built, like almost everything in the country, of wood, though with a solidity that would put to shame many of our buildings of far more durable materials. Its beauty lies in its situation, spanning as it does with its eleven broad flat arches, the clear swift stream of the Torjedahl. The depth was such that ships of some burthen were lying on each side of the bridge, the centre compartment of which was moveable; but so clear was the water, that the very foundations of the piers could be seen as the Parson looked over the parapet; and among them a beautiful school of white trout, as clearly defined as if they had been swimming in air, which, much to his satisfaction, he discerned working their way up from the sea. This sight was doubly satisfactory, for he had been ominously shaking his head at the peculiar ultra-marine tint of the waters,—a sight in itself abundantly beautiful, as any one who has seen the Rhone at Geneva can testify, but far from welcome to the eyes of a fisherman, as indicating, beyond a doubt, the presence of melted snow.

The Parson had reached the last arch, and was sitting on the parapet, on the look-out for the returning boats; admiring in the meanwhile the quiet little amphitheatre which forms the last reach of the Torjedahl after its exit from its mountain gorge, and scanning the quaint, old-fashioned town, with its dark-red wooden houses, overtopped by its heavy cathedral, on the tower of which the Lion of Norway, and the Axe of St. Olaf, were glittering in the sun; and occasionally peering into the gabled sheds of its dockyard, from each of which peeped out the bows of a gun-boat,—that formidable flotilla which, during the late wars, had hung on our Baltic trade like a swarm of musquitos, perpetually dispersed by our cruisers, and as perpetually re-united on some different and unexpected point. Beyond this was the island citadel, a place of no strength, indeed, for the strength of Norway does not lie in its fortifications, but a point of considerable beauty in the eye of an artist. The whole of this picture to seaward as well as to landward, was set in by a frame of miniature mountains—not hills, nor anything like hills, but real fantastically shaped mountains, with peaked heads, some of them showing their bare rocks, with little splashes of mica slate sparkling like diamonds, but most of them covered with dark fir to their very summits, only shooting out occasionally a bare cliff, so arid and so perpendicular that no tree could find root on it.

So intently was the Parson gazing on the scene, that it was some time before he caught sight of Birger’s praam, which was rapidly approaching the place where he was sitting, and some time longer before he made out the very uncomfortable position in which his friend was placed. Birger, dexterous enough in the management of a boat, even that most ticklish of boats, the Norwegian praam—a dexterity which any one will appreciate who has ever attempted the navigation of a Welsh coracle, or can picture to himself what it is to be at sea in a washing-tub—had proved an apt scholar in the science of harling; and the Captain, having seen him make two or three traverses without upsetting his boat or entangling his flies, had proceeded on his mission and left him to his own devices. The boat was hardly out of sight when a heavy fish rose at the fly. Birger seized his rod, as he had been directed, but in his agitation forgot to secure his paddles, both of which dropped overboard, and, unseen and unheeded, set out on an independent cruise of their own,—and thus the salmon, of course, had it all his own way. It so happened that he headed to seaward, and the light praam offering very little resistance, and the stream, which was sweeping stilly and steadily at the rate of three or four miles an hour, forwarding him on his way, there was every probability of his reaching it.

No sooner had the Parson realised the true state of things, than he rushed across the bridge for his boat; but the bridge was by no means a short one, and the Parson was at the farthest end; and long before he reached it, salmon, Birger, praam, and all had disappeared under one of the centre arches.

The boatmen had, of course, lounged away from the quay, probably to the nearest brandy shop; but the Parson sprang into a boat, cut the painter, seized the paddles, and shoved off furiously into the stream.

Fortunately, this had been seen by the Captain, who was at that moment returning; and he, though of course perfectly unaware what was the matter, changed his course, and dashed through the nearest arch, in pursuit.

By this time the praam was fairly at sea; but the boats were nearing her fast, and the Captain, having the advantage of oars, passed the Parson’s boat, and then, checking his speed, lest he should capsize the friend he meant to aid, grappled the praam with his boat-hook, and, winding his own boat at the same time, towed her quietly and steadily to a little sandy beach. Upon this, both he and Birger landed. The latter, whose arms were aching as only a salmon-fisher’s arms can ache, was glad enough to transfer his rod to the Captain.

The Parson calling in vain for a gaff, which implement in the hurry had been left in one of the other boats, threw himself into the water, which there was not much over his knees. But the salmon, seeing his enemies on every side, collected his energies afresh, as that gallant fish will do, and rattled off fifty yards of line into the deep blue sea before the Captain could turn him. He had, however, a practised hand to deal with. Slowly and carefully did the Captain reel him up, guiding him to the spot a little above where the Parson was standing as still and motionless as the rocks around him. There was as yet a considerable current, arising from the flow of the river, and the Captain, taking advantage of this, let the fish tail down quietly and inch by inch, to where the Parson was standing motionless and stooping so that his hands were already under water. Slowly, and without effort, the fish came nearer and nearer, till at last, gripping firmly with both hands the thin part just above the insertion of the tail, the Parson, half-lifting the fish from the water, dragged him to land, and, despite his struggles, threw him gasping on the snow-white beach.

“Well done, Birger!” said the Captain, laying his rod against a rock, and running down, steelyard in hand; “there is the first fish of the season, and you are the prize-man.”

“Hurrah,” said Birger, admiring his own handiwork,—for the steelyard had given a full two-and-twenty pounds,—“this is the first salmon I ever caught in my life; and upon my word, when I had him, I thought I had got hold of Loki himself.”

“And upon my word,” said the Parson, “it looked as if Loki had got hold of you; I thought he was taking you off to his own realms. If we had not come up, you would have been by this time half way to the Midgard Serpent!”[5]

“Well,” said Birger, “it took all the Œsir together to land the aboriginal salmon; and, I must say, Thor himself could not have handled him better than you did.”

“What is your story?” said the Captain; “sit down there and tell it us. You will lose no time,” he added—for Birger, having once tasted blood, looked very much as if he wished to be at work again—“you will lose no time, I tell you, for I must crimp this fish for our dinners. Who can tell if we are to catch another to-day? Parson, lend me your crimping-knife; I left mine in the boat.”

The Parson produced from his slip-pocket that formidable weapon, called by our transatlantic brethren a bowie knife; and the Captain, having first put the fish out of his misery, proceeded to prepare him scientifically for the toasting-skewers.

“Now, Birger, for the story. So much I know, that it is something about diabolical agency. Loki, I believe, is the Devil of Scandinavian mythology.”

“Not exactly,” said Birger; “though we must admit that he and his progeny, the Wolf Fenrir and the Midgard Serpent, are the origin of evil, and will eventually cause the destruction of the world. But Loki really was one of the Œsir, or gods, and had sworn brotherhood with Odin himself; and thus, though he often played them mischievous tricks, they seem to have associated with him, as one is in the habit of doing with a disreputable brother-officer—not exactly liking him, far less approving of his ways, but still consorting with him, and permitting him to be a participator of their exploits. At last, however, when he had gone so far as to misguide poor blind Hodur, so as to make him kill Baldur, they determined that this really was too bad. Baldur was a general favourite; everything good or beautiful, either in this world or in Asgard, was called after him; and the unanimous vote was, that Loki should be brought to justice, and made to suffer for this. Loki, however, who rather suspected that he had gone too far, himself, was no where to be found. He had quitted Asgard in the form of a mist,—whence, I presume, we derive the expression ‘to mizzle,’—and had betaken himself to the great fall called Fränängars Foss, where he lived by catching salmon;—for Loki, it is said, was the first inventor of nets.”

“I have not a doubt of it,” said the Captain. “I always did think that those stake nets must have been invented by the Principle of Evil himself.”

“Well, so it was, at all events,” said Birger. “Odin, however, one day, while sitting upon his Throne of Air, Hlidsjälf, happened to fix his eye upon him—I say eye, for you know Odin had but one, having left the other in pledge at the Mimir Fountain. No sooner did he see him, than he called to Heimdall, the celestial warder, to blow his horn, and summon the gods to council at the Well of Urdar.

“Loki, perceiving that something was suspected, burnt his nets, and, changing himself into a salmon, took refuge under the fall; so that, when the gods arrived at Fränägngar, they found nothing but the ashes of the nets. It so happened, however, that the shape of the meshes was left perfect in the white ash to which it was burnt, and the god Kvasir, who, I presume, must be the god who presides over the detective police of Heaven, saw what had happened, and set the gods weaving nets after the pattern of the ashes.[6]

“When all was ready, they dragged the river; but Loki placed his head under a stone—as that clever fish, the salmon, will do,—and the net slipped over his smooth, scaly back. The Œsir felt him shoot through, and tried another cast, weighting the net with a spare heap of new shields, which the Valkyrir had brought the day before from a battle-field, in order to mend the roof of Valhalla. Loki, however, leaped the net this time gallantly, and again took refuge under the foss.

“This time the gods dragged down stream; Thor wading in the river behind the net. Thor did not mind wading; he was obliged to do that every day that he went to council, for the bridge of Bifrost would not bear him. In the meanwhile Vidar, the God of Silence, in the form of a seal, cruised about at the river’s mouth.

“Loki had thought to go to sea and take refuge with his daughter, Jörmungard the Serpent, but, in assuming the form of a salmon, he had assumed also, of necessity, the natural antipathies and fears of the fish. He turned at a sight so terrible to a salmon, and again sprang over the net. But Thor was ready for him, and while he was in the air, caught him in his hand, just above the insertion of the tail; and you may observe that salmon have never yet recovered from that tremendous squeeze, but are finer and thinner at the root of the tail than any fish that swims.”

“Well,” said the Captain, “that is quite true; it is a fact that every salmon-fisher knows; and he knows also that the root of the tail is the only part of the salmon by which it is possible to hold him, and that it is possible to hold him by that the Parson showed you just now practically. But it is very satisfactory to find out the reason of such things, particularly when the reason is such a very good one. What did the gods do with Mr. Loki when they had got him; crimp him, and eat him?”

“They could not kill him,” said Birger, “because of the oath of brotherhood which Odin had one day incautiously sworn with him (I presume, when they were both drunk); so they laid him on his back on three pointed rocks in a cave, and bound him with three cords which they afterwards transformed into iron bars; and there he will lie, shifting himself, every now and then, from side to side, and producing what mortals call earthquakes, until that day, known only to the Nornir, when the twilight shall fall upon Asgard, and the conflagration of the world is at hand.”

“Serve him right, too,” said the Captain; “I am delighted to hear that the inventor of salmon-nets perished—like Perillus and other rascals—by his own invention. I hope the gods will keep him purgatory, or whatever they call it, as long as rivers run toward the sea. However, here is our Loki (holding up, by the tail, the scored salmon), and, as we have not been geese enough to swear brotherhood with him, he will do for our dinner. What shall we do, in the meanwhile, to crimp him?”

“Make him fast to the boat, and tow him a-stern for ten minutes,” said the Parson; “the water of the Torjedahl is cold enough to crimp a live fish, let alone a dead one. And, I will tell you what: let Torkel go with the praam for the other boats, and meet us on the left bank, just above the bridge. I want to show you a view of our route to-day that is worth seeing.”

So saying, he led the way up a steep, rugged path, just discernible among the rocks of the rugged ridge which divides the amphitheatre in which Christiansand is situated from the wild coasts of the Fjord; and, passing through a sort of natural opening cut in the summit ridge, pointed to the scene before them. “There,” said he, “what do you think of that?”

Birger was an artist; and, anxious as he was to begin his career as a fisherman, his ever-ready sketchbook was drawn out of his pocket; nor did he express a wish to move till the rugged foreground upon which they stood, the luxuriant park-like middle distance, with its clumps of trees, and dark-red houses, and neat English-looking church, and the background of fir-clad mountains, range beyond range, and the deep narrow gorge through which their journey lay, which the blue lake-like river seemed to fill from side to side, were transferred to the paper.

A few minutes’ walk brought them to where the boats were waiting, with the whole house of Ullitz, handmaidens and all, who had come to see them off. Hand-shaking all round—the fishermen took their places—the boats shoved off—Marie threw after them her kid slipper, for luck, (for that custom is of Scandinavian origin)—English Tom gave three cheers, after the manner of her Britannic Majesty’s navy—and the expedition started on its voyage up the Torjedahl.

The Parson, who was anxious to reach the proposed encampment at Oxea, while there was yet light to pitch the tents, would suffer no harling, notwithstanding Birger’s remonstrances, until the first rapids had been safely passed; and, indeed, with the exception of the single throw where the Lieutenant had hooked his fish that morning, that part of the river was scarcely worth the trouble.

The rapids, however, which had been surveyed beforehand by the Captain, were passed, under his skilful pilotage, in much less time than had been allotted for the operation, and then, with one consent, the flies were thrown upon the water.

Above the rapids, the river forms what is technically called a “flat;” a spot carefully to be sought out by the exploring fisherman, as the likeliest to reward his search. A flat is where the water rolls on with its acquired velocity and the pressure of that which is behind it, rather than on account of any declivity in the bed through which it flows. In the present instance, indeed, the bed of the river actually rose instead of sinking, for the ridge of rocks which form the head of the rapids, had retained the stones and loose earth washed down in the winter floods. This gradually shallowed the whole river, spreading it out, at the same time, like a lake, so as to fill the level of the valley from mountain to mountain. These rose abruptly on either hand, in bare, inaccessible cliffs, as if they had been forced asunder by some convulsion of Nature, to make room for the rush of waters, and exhibited a bare splintered face of rock.

At the end of an hour—for the Parson would allow no more—all fears were at an end for that night’s supper; no other salmon, indeed, had risen, but trout after trout had been handed into the boats, some of them, too, of a very respectable size: even Birger had not been without his share of success.

But the stream was strong, the day was waning, many miles intervened between them and their camping-ground, the Parson was inexorable; so the casting-lines were exchanged for harling-tackle, and the squadron formed in order of sailing.

The difference between a common casting-line and the harling-tackle which one rod in each boat should carry in every exploring expedition, consists principally in the length of the gut. The harling line carries five or six flies, in order to show, at once, as great a variety as possible of size and colour, and is joined to the reel-line by a swivel, in order to prevent it from kinking—while two, or, at the most, three, flies will be found quite sufficient for casting.

The order of march was this:—Birger led, with his gun in his hand, ready for a stray duck or teal, many of which would whistle over their heads, as evening drew on. He was directed to keep, as near as possible, to the middle of the stream; while, on either flank, and about twenty yards behind him, came his two friends, with one rod in each boat for harling, while, with the other, they whipped into the likely ripples. Shooting and fishing, however, were made altogether a secondary condition to progress: they might catch what they could, and shoot what they could, but the rowers were to pull steadily forward.

And thus they opened reach after reach of the beautiful river, for the most part pent in by inaccessible cliffs, on which the birch trees seemed to grow on each other’s heads, and to support above them all a serrated crest of spruce and fir. But, now and then, they would come to little semicircular coombs, where the mountain wall would recede for a space, leaving flats of twenty or thirty acres, which were carefully cultivated to the very water’s brink, and planted at the roots of the mountains with white poplar, the dried leaves of which were to serve for beds in the summer and hay in the winter. Here would be dark-red wooden houses with overhanging eaves, and tidy, compact, little farmsteadings, with their granaries, and store-rooms, and cattle-sheds, all complete in themselves: and they had need be, for they were completely isolated from the rest of the world. There was no road, not even a footpath; no possibility of ingress or egress, except that which the river afforded. The mountains, except here and there, were inaccessible; and at every turn of the river, seemed to beetle over it, shutting out each little amphitheatre from its neighbour. The winter is the Torjedahler’s time of liberty: then it is that their vehicles are put into requisition; then it is that their corn and cattle, if they produce any beyond their own consumption, are brought to market; for the river, which has hitherto been their boundary, forms now their railroad and frost-constructed channel of communication.

The shadows were darkening on the clear river, and the arms of even Norwegian rowers were beginning to ache, when the last point was rounded; and the Parson’s joyous shout gave notice that their camping-ground was at last reached; and at the welcome signal, the lines were reeled up with alacrity, and the boats’ heads were directed to the shore.

The spot had been selected by him and Ullitz the year before, partly as lying conveniently near to Mosse Eurd, their proposed head-quarters, which it was considered expedient to reach before noon on the morrow, in order to afford time for their men hutting themselves and foraging out the resources of the place; but principally from its own beauty and convenience.

So precious is level land by the banks of the river, that it is rare to find any portion of it uncultivated of sufficient extent for such an encampment as they required. But here, at the foot of a winter torrent, whose dry bed gave access to the uplands in summer, and brought down rocks and uprooted trees in the winter, was a rough plain, formed, no doubt, originally from the debris brought down by the torrent, but now covered with short turf and cranberry-bushes, with a few thick, bushy, white poplars, the leaves of which had not yet been stripped for hay; while here and there a graceful birch-tree formed a natural tent with its weeping branches.

“Tom, bring the sails with you,” said the Captain, who had leaped ashore to reconnoitre the ground; “we will have our tent under this rock.”

“Capital place!” said Birger; “and bring the axe with you, Tom, as well: that fir will make a first-rate ridge-pole, and it blocks up the place where it stands.”

The Captain, not accustomed yet to the trifling value put upon timber, hesitated to chop up a very promising young tree,—which, indeed, was unnecessarily large for the purpose, and which stood but very little in the way, after all.

“Why,” said Birger, “the very best fir-tree that ever grew is not worth a specie daler here; and as for that stick——” substituting the action for the word, he struck deep into its side, and in a dozen strokes or so it came crashing down among the under-stuff.

There was no lack of fuel: there never is in Norway, where outsides of timber float down the rivers unheeded; and trees, uprooted by the winter storms and land-slips, rot where they fall. Before half the things were out of the boats, three or four fires were throwing round their cheerful light, some for cooking, some for wantonness, for the evening was anything but cold. Birger, however, who, as a Swedish soldier, had had a good deal of experience in bivouacking,—an exercise to which they are all regularly drilled,—set his own two men to gather and pile fuel enough to last through the night; observing that they would all find it cold enough before morning, when those scamps had burned up the fuel at hand.

The Captain and the Parson were occupied in collecting and weighing the fish, and apportioning them and the other provisions among the men, while Jacob, the courier, seated on a stone, apart, was plucking and preparing half-a-dozen teal that Birger had shot during the passage. These, to the Parson’s surprise, he deliberately cut in pieces, and consigned to the great soup-kettle, along with a piece of salt-beef from the harness cask, and various condiments which he made a great secret of.

It may be observed that in Norway fresh meat is seldom eaten, unless it be on grand occasions, or by those who are well to do in the world. October is called in the north the Slaughtering Month, and every family there is occupied in salting, not only for winter, but for the rest of the year. A harness cask, therefore,—that is to say, a small cask with a moveable head, containing salt-beef or pork in pickle,—is a very common thing to meet with, and in fact had formed the pièce de resistance of Madame Ullitz’s stores.

“Look here, Jacob, my man,” said the Captain; “I will show you a trick in cookery that has never reached Gottenborg yet, nor London neither, for that matter; it is worth a hogshead of your teal-soup.”

He called to Tom, who had been preparing under his superintendence certain square sods of turf, and some long white skewers; which, in the absence of arbutus—in Ireland considered indispensable on such occasions,—he had been directed to cut from the juniper.

Birger’s salmon, the flakes of which had actually curled under the cold of the waters, preserving all their curd between them, was cut into what he technically termed fids; each one of these was spread open by the skewers and fixed upon the turfs. These the Captain ranged round a great heap of hot embers, which he had raked from the fire, and set English Tom to turn as they required, basting them pretty freely with salt and water.

The remaining fish had been given to the men, by whom they were subjected to a variety of culinary operations; one of which was making soup of them; and the fires began to grow bright and cheery in the increasing darkness, when Jacob paraded his kettle of teal-soup, and Tom set before each of the fishermen a turf of toasted salmon.

In return, they received the men’s rations of brandy, the only part of the provisions on which any limitation was affixed. This in Norway, perhaps, was considered but a small modicum: it would have been, however, quite enough to make twice the number of Englishmen roaring drunk.

The men collected round their fires, looking like so many gipsies; provisions were dispatched in enormous quantities, pipes were lighted, horns produced and filled with pure brandy, in which each man drank “du” with his neighbour,—an ancient Scandinavian ceremony, which entitles the drinkers henceforward to address one another in the second person singular, and to consider themselves on terms of intimacy.

In the meanwhile, the principal personages of the expedition sat at the door of their tent, for which the Captain received his due meed of praise, he having brought the canvas. They tempered their brandy with a little water, after the custom of their country, and they smoked somewhat better tobacco than the Norwegians; but after their kind, they indulged in very nearly the same relaxations as their attendants.

And thus fell the shades of night upon the first day of the expedition.

CHAPTER VII.
THE ENCAMPMENT MOSSE EURD.

“Our good house is there,

Though it be humble:

Each man is master at home.”

Hávamál.

“Rouse out, Birger, my boy,” said the Captain; “recollect we have got the Rapids of Oxea to pass before we get any breakfast, and that we have our breakfast to catch into the bargain. Come, come,” continued he, as Birger stretched himself on his Astrakan cloak, as if he was thinking of another spell of sleep, “‘shake off dull sloth, and early rise,’ as Dr. Watts says—see me rouse out those lazy hounds down there!” And that he did, in good earnest, by firing off both barrels within a foot of their ears; a salutation responded to by a chorus of yelping from the dogs, who imagined, of course, that shooting was begun already.

This had the effect of speedily setting the whole party in motion; and Jacob, who, with provident care, had prepared, over-night, a kettle of coffee, raked together the embers of the still burning fires, presented each with a full horn of it, a very welcome introduction to the day’s labour; and then, as wood was plentiful, threw on some logs for a parting blaze.

The river itself formed the fishermen’s washing-basin, and the boat’s thwarts their toilet-tables. Bitter cold, indeed, was the water; whatever the air may be, there is seldom much caloric to spare in the water till autumn is pretty well advanced; but, at least, it had the effect of thoroughly waking them, and causing them fully to appreciate the luxury of the now blazing fires to dress by.

OPENING OF THE CAMPAIGN.

[p. 78.]

No one who has any regard for his health should think of going on a fishing expedition, however short, without a complete change of clothes,—one set for work, and one for dining and sleeping in. No man has any business, indeed, on such an expedition at all, who is afraid of water; but whether he is afraid or not, he will be sure to be wet, at one time or other, during the day. This, while the limbs are in exercise and the sun above the horizon, is all well enough; but let no man, however hardy he may think himself, sleep habitually in wet clothes, or in clothes hastily and imperfectly dried by the camp fire. The very bracing of the nerves during the day, which prevents the fisherman from taking injury by what would be called imprudence by his stay-at-home friends, makes the relaxation and reaction during the night more complete; and during that time he is exposed to a host of dangers which vanish before the face of the sun. With all his precautions, no man gets up from his night’s sleep in the open air without a little stiffness in the limbs for the first minute or so, though it may vanish at the first plunge into the water of his morning’s ablutions. But without these precautions, he is not unlikely to cut short his own expedition by any one of a dozen diseases which no amount of animal courage will enable him to bear up against, and thus he will be defeating his own object. It is very well to bear hardships cheerily when they are unavoidable—cheerfulness itself is a preservative. But it is only very young sportsmen indeed, who will seek out hardships for the pleasure of undergoing them.

Our fishermen were not young sportsmen, they were men of experience. The Parson and the Captain had both of them learned their lesson in Ireland, where people soon begin to understand what wet means; and Birger was a Swedish soldier, and had learnt these matters professionally. Before they started, they had settled the invariable rule of a complete dress for dinner, under any circumstances whatever, which implied, of course, as complete a dress in the morning: it is necessary almost to bind oneself to some such vow, there are so many temptations to break it; in Norway especially, where, though the summer days are hot—hotter by many degrees than they are in England, and the evenings in the highest degree enjoyable, the morning air is generally sharp and bracing, and the water which comes down from the snowy ranges bitterly cold.

Jacob, in the meanwhile, whose toilet did not take very long, and who rarely occupied himself in any work which did not especially belong to his own department, had been parleying with a young fellow, who, roused by the Captain’s gun, had pulled across in his boat from the opposite side, while the rest of the men were occupied in preparing the boats and re-arranging the articles that had been taken on shore the preceding evening.

They came up together to where the Parson was standing by the fire, busily engaged in exchanging his salmon casting-line for one better adapted for trout.

“The young man says that the river is dangy,” said he; for though he spoke English well enough, he has his own particular words, which it was necessary to make out.

“Dingy,” said the Parson, without any very clear comprehension of what was meant, but rather reverting in his mind to the azure transparency of the waters; which, in truth, he would gladly have seen a little stained by mud. “Well, that is a good job. But I fear he will find himself a little mistaken.”

Jacob evidently had not conveyed his meaning: he looked round for Tom or Torkel to assist him, but they were both in the boats, working busily under the Captain’s orders; so Jacob tried his hand again.

“The young man says that there is a great deal of water in the river from the snow. He says that boats are very often sunk at Oxea.”

“Humph!” said the Parson, who began to suspect something.

Here the young man himself broke in with a long story in Norske.

“He says,” interpreted Jacob, “only last week, one boat was upset, and two men were drowned.”

“Aye? aye?” said the Parson; “what! sober men?”

Jacob did not see the inference, or would not. “This young man is a river-pilot,” said he; “he will take you up for two mark each boat.”

“I tell you what it is, Mr. Jacob,” said the Parson; “I will teach you a lesson. When you engaged as our courier, you meant to fleece us all pretty handsomely. Well, I have nothing to say against this. As courier, it is your undoubted privilege so to do. But remember this, it is equally your duty, as courier, to prevent any one else from fleecing us. And if I find you only once again failing in that respect, off you go at a minute’s notice. Now send your friend home again.”

Without looking behind him, the Parson, who had now finished fitting his flies, took his place in his own boat, and, directing Torkel to shove off to the other bank, threw his line across the mouth of a small tributary to the great river, which he had marked the year before as abounding with trout. Jacob looked for a moment inclined to rebel, but no man was more alive to his own interests than the ex-smuggler. He had engaged in the trip, not like Tom and Torkel, from sheer love of sport and adventure, but as a profitable speculation. So, pocketing the affront, much as “ancient Pistol” did his leek, he crept down to Birger’s boat, which was his place in the line of march, where he sat sulky, but utterly wasting his sulkiness; for Birger, anxious to keep up his yesterday’s character of a fisherman, was much too intent upon the—to him—difficult manœuvre of keeping his flies clear of the oars, to observe whether he was pleased or not.

The Captain took the inner line skirting the shore on the right bank, for it had been agreed that the flat below the Oxea rapids should be well tried, in hopes of getting some fresh fish for breakfast.

Though last in the field, he drew the first blood, hooking and, in a few minutes, landing a small salmon, and thus securing a breakfast. And by the time the boats came together again, the Parson had brought to bag a very fair supply of fjeld öret, or brook trout, from the little streamlet he had been trying. And now began the serious business of the day.

Notwithstanding Mr. Jacob’s information, the rapids of Oxea are perfectly safe to sober men. It is impossible that an accident can happen in them, except from carelessness; for the water, though swift, is everywhere deep. The stream falls with some force over a slanting ledge of smooth, slaty rock, some three or four hundred yards long or perhaps more, and acquires in its slide considerable velocity; but the bottom is smooth, and the surface nowhere broken by sunken rocks. The stream, therefore, is a steady current, surging up against the numerous islands which dot the river, as if they had been pieces of a ruined bridge. Each of these was crested with its half-dozen or so of ash or birch, which looked as if it was they that were in motion, and not the clear stream that was racing past them.

The passage was a sheer trial of strength, requiring no great amount of pilotage, or local experience, or even skill. The ropes were got out and made fast to two or three thwarts, to take off the strain; the boats were lightened of their living incumbrances—except so far as the steersmen were concerned,—and were then tracked by main force one by one, every one of the party lending a hand, except, indeed, Jacob, who considered it his duty, having once said the rapids were dangerous, to act as if he thought so, and who had, therefore, been despatched by land to the head of the rapid, with orders to light the fires and get the breakfast ready, as nothing else could be done with him.

The principal difficulty arose from the uncertainty of the footing among the crags, and the gnarled ash-trees that every here and there shot almost horizontally from between the fissures of the rock, dipping their branches into the stream. These rendered it necessary, every now and then, to make fast the boat to the tree itself, and then to float down a line to it from some point above the obstacle, for the river fortunately ran in a curve at that place. Thus, by giving a broad sheer into the stream, while the rest of the party hauled upon the rope, the boat would swing clear of the impediment.

But all this was very hard work, and, as the sun was now high in heaven, very hot work; and, moreover, it had to be repeated three times before all the boats were in safety. Fully as much justice was done to Jacob’s breakfast as had been done to his supper on the preceding evening; and most luxurious was the hour’s rest which succeeded it.

The remaining part of the voyage was easy: there was a sharp current, no doubt, too sharp for anything to speak of to be done with the flies; but it was all plain travelling, and, with an occasional help from the ropes, before noon their destination had been reached. This was the foot of a low fall, or something between a fall and a rapid, called “The Aal Foss,” in the middle of which was a picturesque rocky island, covered with trees, and on the left bank an equally picturesque peninsula, which was destined to be the head-quarters of the expedition, and the basis of subsequent operations.

“There,” said the Parson, fixing his rod in the stern-rings, and springing on shore as the boat’s keel touched a sandy, slaty beach in the isthmus of the peninsula—

“Thus far into the bowels of the land

Have we marched on without impediment.

Here is the limit of my survey. Thus far have I borne the baton of command; and I beg you to observe that we have reached the appointed spot twenty minutes before the appointed time.” And he held out his watch in proof of it. “I have, as you see, performed my promise; and thus I resign the leadership of the expedition.”

“With universal thanks and approbation,” said the Captain; “and I propose that now the leadership devolve upon Birger; he is the man of camps and bivouacs, for he has experienced what we have only read about.”

“Well,” said Birger, “I will not affect modesty. Like others, I have passed my degrees, and it would be a great shame if bearing his Majesty’s commission, I did not understand what every soldier is taught.” Then, suddenly recollecting that the Captain was a military man as well as himself, he steered adroitly out of his scrape, continuing, as if his concluding paragraph had been part of his original speech—“You have only to wait for a war, Captain, and you will be in a situation to give us all a lesson. No one understood these things better than your old Peninsula men; but Sweden thinks her soldiers ought to learn their business before we are called out to fight, and not afterwards.”

To pass the degrees—“gradar,” or rather “gradarne,” for no one ever thinks of speaking of them without the definite article “ne,” as if there were no other degrees in the world—is anything but a joke in Sweden. Military service, so far, at least, as the Guards and the Indelta[7] are concerned, is extremely popular. There is ample choice in candidates; and very good care is taken that the officers shall be men who know their business, and shall not be at a loss in what situation soever they may be placed. The “gradar” consists of a series of lectures and extremely strict examinations, in everything connected with the service, both intellectual or physical, from the construction of an equilateral triangle up to the sketch of a campaign, and from the musket drill to a year of sea service. Passing out in seamanship is indispensable; for Sweden, reversing our principle of hatching ducklings under hens, hatches her young death-or-glory cornets and ensigns on board her ships. Properly speaking, the Swedish navy has no midshipmen. The cadets, who fill pretty numerously the midshipman’s berth, may possibly enter the navy, if they are so inclined; but nine-tenths of them are candidates for commissions in the army, and are thus learning a lesson which may be of use to them hereafter, when they have troops of their own to embark or manage on ship-board.

Birger had passed his degrees with credit, or he would not have been selected as a travelling student; and his companions were now likely to profit by this circumstance, for one of those degrees comprehends all these mysteries of camping, and hunting, and cooking, and provisioning, and, if scandal may be trusted, a sort of Spartan stealing, which goes under the euphemism of “availing one’s self of the resources of the country;” these little matters being taught by a three weeks’ actual practice in the field every summer.

Birger was altogether in his element. “Now,” said he, “the first thing I must do is to borrow all your boatmen, for I shall want every man I can lay my hands upon; some for the camps, and some for cutting and drawing fuel; I can find something to do for them all, and for more too if I had them. And here, you Jacob, take a basket with you, and see what you can forage out from the cottages and woods about, in the way of milk, bread, butter, berries, and so forth; and hark you, Jacob, no brandy, if you please; that is the first thing those scamps always put their hands upon.”

“You have not reckoned us,” said the Captain, “among your effective strength; we shall not be of much use in foraging, as we cannot speak Norske, but we have hands and heads too.”

“Do not forget how scantily the camp is provisioned,” said Birger; “we have not had time or opportunity to catch or shoot anything since we left Oxea, where, I am sure, we ate up most of our fresh fish. It will not do to be drawing too largely from our supplies.”

“I have no objection, I am sure,” said the Parson; “but you must let us have one boat, Birger; even if we are to fish this river from the shore, there is half a mile of open space, certainly, between this and the great falls of Wigeland; but best throws lie on the right bank, and we really must have the power of crossing.”

“Well,” said Birger, “I cannot spare you Torkel, that is certain—he is much too valuable; take your own boatman; you may halloo out ‘Kom öfver elven,[8]’ if you want him, and happen to be on the wrong side; and if he cannot hear you, say ‘Skynda paa mid baaten sáa skall du faa drikspengar,’[9] and I will warrant he hears fast enough, deaf as he may be to the first call. We must have one of the boats above this fall,” he continued, musing; “and we may as well do it at once. We will set all hands to launch it over this isthmus, before we do anything else, and then you can use it for your passage-boat. And now for the camp. Tom, Torkel, my own man Peter, my boatman and the Captain’s will be little enough for what I have to do, though there are some good hands among them, as I saw last night and this morning too at Oxea.”

“We must fish, then,” said the Captain; “for there is no use going about after grouse, in this thick forest, without Torkel, or some one that knows the place; we should be but wasting our time, poking about these trees at hap-hazard.”

“And, I am half-afraid that we shall not do much in fishing either,” said the Parson, as they got a sight of the upper reach of the river, which lay calm and shining before them. “The sun is as bright as if Odin[10] had got his other eye out of pledge, and were shining on us with both at once.”

The Captain whistled a few bars of the Canadian Boat Song.

“Yes,” said the Parson, “it is very true, as you whistle, but, though the sun be bright, and, though ‘there be not a breath the blue wave to curl,’ we must try what we can do. It adds considerably to the interest of fishing, when we know that our supper depends upon it.”

“If this were the old Erne,” said the Captain, “we might whistle for our supper, in good earnest; but, it must be confessed, that the fish here are very innocent; we may deceive one; it is not impossible; for, as Pat Gallagher used to say, ‘there are fools everywhere.’ But—look here,” he said, as he cast across the stream, “positively, you may see the shadow of the line on the bottom, deep as the water is.”

“Let us cross,” said the Parson. “‘Gaa öfver elven,’ as Birger says, for I see they have got the boat up: near the great fall there are some strong streams that will defy the sun and the calm together.”

Thanks to the innocence of the salmon, which the Captain had hinted at, their pot-fishing was not entirely without success: the upper part of the reach, where the waters had not yet recovered their serenity after undergoing the roar and fury of the great fall, did actually furnish them with a graul or two; but the salmon that had arrived at years of discretion were very much too cautious to be taken. They had never, it is true, been fished for in their lives with anything more delicate than a piece of whipcord and a bunch of lobworms, as big as a cricket-ball; but, for all that, they were quite old enough to draw an inference, and were perfectly aware that natural grasshoppers were not in the habit of swimming about with lines tied to their noses.

Towards evening there sprang up a light air of wind, and the rises began to be more frequent. The Captain, by making use of Birger’s prescribed form of words, had got the boatman to land him on the rocky island which divides the Aal Foss into two branches. There, concealed by a stubby fir, not quite so high as himself, he was sending out twenty yards of line that fell so lightly that it never seemed to touch the water at all.

There is no doubt that, of all the Erne fishermen, it was the Captain who threw the longest and the lightest line, and well was the Captain aware of that fact: but there is an axiom which “far and fine” fishers would do well to bear in mind, and which, though apparently evident to the meanest capacity, is very seldom borne in mind by any one; and that is, that it is of very little use to fish “far and fine,” when the fish themselves are lying, all the while, in the water close under your feet. This was precisely the Captain’s position; the waters, divided by the rock on which he was standing, were naturally deepest close to the rock itself, and, as naturally, the best fish lay in the deepest water. The Captain understood this well, but he could not deny himself his length of line, and, therefore, contrived to fish the water close to him by raising his arms, bringing the point of his rod over his right shoulder, and then whisking his flies out for a fresh cast with a dextrous turn of the wrist which no man in England but himself could have performed.

“I will tell you what,” said the Parson—who, not having met with much success, had stuck up his rod, and had got himself ferried over to the island—“it is not very likely that a fish of any size will rise this evening, but if such a thing should happen I would not give much for your rod.”

“I wish the biggest fish in the river——”

The sentence was never finished, for, at the word, the wish was granted; and, if not the biggest fish in the river, certainly the biggest fish they had yet seen, rose at the fly when it was not a foot from the rock.

The rod never stood a chance. Raised at a sharp angle over the Captain’s shoulder, the whole strain came upon the top-piece, which, as he struck, snapped like a flower-stalk, without effort or resistance; and away rushed the fish forty or fifty yards up-stream with the top-piece, which had run down upon the fly, bobbing against his nose.

The Captain did all that man could do. Carefully did he watch his fish, anticipating every movement; instantly did he dip his rod, as the salmon sprang madly into air—instantly did he recover it; promptly was the line reeled in at the turn; tenderly was it given out at the rush; but it was of no avail—the rod had lost its delicate spring; and, despite the Captain’s care, every now and then the fish would get a stiff pull against the stump, thus gradually enlarging the hold which the hook had taken in the skin of the jaw, till, at last, just as the Parson, who had been hoping against hope, was taking the cork off the point of his gaff and clearing away the brambles to get a good standing place for using it, the line came up slack; the hold had given way.

The Parson had the generosity to be silent about his warning that had received so immediate a fulfilment.

“Well,” he said, “you have recovered your top; that is something, so many miles from Bell Yard; and as for the fish, depend upon it that there are more where he came from.”

The Captain mused a little. With the exception of Birger’s chance-medley, they had not seen a full-grown salmon[11] since they had come upon the river, and the loss was no light one. “I suppose,” he said, interrogatively, “it would be hardly worth while to fetch another top from the camp?”

“Not at all worth while,” said the Parson; “the wonder is, that you rose one full-mouthed fish on such a day as this. You are not going to rise another. Besides,” he added, “look at the sun! It is time for us to think of cooking, rather than catching. Birger will be wondering what is become of us.”

They were at no great distance from the camp, which, to their surprise, they found tenanted by Jacob alone, who, having got over his morning sulks, was busy in what he called a Långref, a miniature variety of which is not altogether unknown to our Hampshire poachers; but Jacob’s was a tremendous affair, more like what in sea-fishing is called a spillet or bolter, consisting of three or four hundred yards of water cord, and half as many hooks.

“Halloo,” said the Captain; “what has become of them all? Why, Jacob, where is Lieutenant Birger?”

“He is gone with the men to make an offering to Nyssen,” said Jacob.

“Who the devil is Nyssen?” said the Captain.

Jacob looked distressed. It is not lucky to mention the mundane spirits and those of hell in the same sentence; in fact, the less people talk about either of them the better, so, at least, the Swedes think, and therefore imprecate their curses by saying, “The Thousand take you,” leaving it for your own conscience to determine whether they are consigning you to saints or devils.

“There they are, you may see them yourself,” replied he, evading the question, and pointing to a bare rounded rock which rose above the wooded summits about a mile down the river.

The Parson’s telescope was in his hand in a moment; but all he could make out was, that they put something on the ground which they left there, and immediately entered the thick wood, which hid them from his sight. Jacob could not, or at all events would not, satisfy their curiosity, and they had nothing for it but to amuse themselves with admiring Birger’s handy-work, till that individual on his return should make his own report of himself.

And really the Lieutenant would have extorted praise from the head of the Kong’s-öfver-commandant’s-Expedition himself, so well and so orderly was the encampment made.

The sails were formed into three several tents, not very large ones, certainly, and scarcely admitting of the inmates sitting upright, except in the centre, but quite sufficient to shelter a man lying at full length. At the back of these, where the ground rose a little, a neat trench was cut, in order to carry off the drainings of any unforeseen shower. These were the sleeping tents; and in front of them were spread out a quantity of poplar leaves, which were eventually to form the beds, and which were then pretty rapidly undergoing the process of desiccation in the hot and bright sunshine which had hitherto been so unfriendly. A birch trimmed in its weeping branches, and thickened above with a few supplementary boughs of spruce-fir, was evidently arranged for the dining-room, and several of the stores were gathered round its trunk and thatched with fir-branches, while at some distance below, and not far from the sandy beach, stood three or four neat green huts, built with a framework of fir-poles, and thatched closely, both in roof and walls, with the upper branches of the trees that had been cut down for the frame. Not far from where Jacob was sitting over his långref, there was an elaborate kitchen, built of rough stones against a natural rock, with a cross-beam on the top to swing the kettle from, and beside it rose a goodly pile of fuel, cut into lengths, and stacked into what is called in the country fathoms, that is to say, square piles, six feet long and three high. This had evidently been their last work, for the axes and saws were still lying on the unfinished pile. By the river’s bank at the edge of the peninsula was a curious erection, which Jacob called the smoking-house. It was a pyramid constructed of outsides of deals, hundreds of which, rejected from the saw-mills, were floating about unheeded in the river, and drifting into every corner that was sheltered from the current. This was by no means a place constructed for the luxury of smoking tobacco, an amusement in which every individual of the party indulged in every possible place and in all places alike. It was erected for hanging up superfluous salmon which had previously been slightly salted, in order, with the help of smoke from the green juniper, to convert them into what in London is called “kipper.”

There was little use for it that evening, however, for the grauls brought in by the fishermen would have been but scanty allowance, even for the present supper, had they not been helped out by other provisions. But Jacob had by no means been idle in his vocation. On a shelf of rock not very far from the kitchen, and shaded by a friendly tree, stood gallons of milk and piles of flad bröd, with a few raspberries, which were just then ripening, and an actual little mountain of strawberries, for the woods were carpetted with their bright green leaves and scarlet berries.

Jacob, as was his duty, rolled up his långref as quickly as such a combination of tackle could be stowed away, and commenced preparing the fish for dinner, while the fishermen changed their clothes, and hung them to dry round a supplementary fire which had been lighted for the purpose.

CHAPTER VIII.
MAKING A NIGHT OF IT.

“Ale’s not so good

For the children of men

As people have boasted;

For less and less,

As more he drinketh,

Knows man himself.

The kern of forgetfulness

Sits on the drunken

And steals the man’s senses,—

By the bird’s pinions

Fettered I lay

In Gunlada’s dwelling.

Drunken I lay,

Lay thoroughly drunken,

With Fjalar the wise.

This is the best of drink,

That every one afterwards

Comes to his senses.”

High Song of Odin the Old.

Many minutes had not expired, during which brief space the fishermen had been luxuriating in their dry clothes, when the boats were seen working their way back across the tail of the Aal Foss rapid, as they returned with the party from the right bank, which, after bobbing about on the ripples and cross currents, shot into their little harbour beneath the encampment.

Birger came up the bank, half-laughing, yet looking as if he had been doing something he was ashamed of.

“Where the deuce have you been, Birger?” said the Captain, as that worthy threw himself on the turf under the birch-tree: “Jacob says you have been sacrificing to Nyssen, whoever he is.”

“So I have,” said Birger; “but don’t speak so loud. I will tell you all about it.”

“Not speak so loud,” said the Captain; “why not?”

“Well,” said Birger, rather hesitatingly, “Nyssen does not like to be spoken of. That is to say, the men don’t exactly like to hear people speaking of him, at least by name, if it is above the breath.”

“Come, come, Birger, be honest,” said the Parson.

“Well, if you must have it, I do not quite like it myself. I do not believe in such things, of course; but there is no good in doing what everybody thinks unlucky.”

“Well, well,” said the Captain, “but tell us what you have been about. I am quite in the dark as yet about this mysterious gentleman or lady.”

“Why, the Nyss,” said Birger, sinking his voice at the word to a whisper, “is a spirit of the air, just as the Neck (a similar whisper) is a spirit of the water.”

“The very familiars of the Lady of Branksome,” said the Parson:—

It was the Spirit of the Flood,

And he spoke to the Spirit of the Fell.

“Very likely, but our spirits, like our people, are not indifferent to the pleasures of eating and drinking; and therefore, whenever we start on an expedition, we propitiate them with an offering.”

“And the offering consists of——?”

“What we like best ourselves, cakes and ale.”

“But what had you to do with it,” said the Captain; “I suppose you do not believe in spirits?”

“The men asked leave to go, when they had done their work, and wanted me to go with them, to that high rock you see down there,—for they always choose out some bare and elevated locality, as best adapted to a spirit of the air; and so—well, I went with them; don’t laugh at me.”

“That will I not,” said the Parson; “you could not have done a wiser thing. Always fall in with men’s superstitions; there is nothing that attaches them so much as humouring their little illegitimate beliefs; to say nothing,” he added slily, “of believing a little in them yourself.”

“How is this offering made?” said the Captain: “what are the rites belonging to the worship of a spirit of the air?”

“They are simple enough,” said Birger, “and not at all like those you would see on the stage of London,—no blue fires or poetical incantations: they consist in simply placing the cake on the most exposed pinnacle you can find, pouring the ale into the nearest hollow that will hold it, and then retreating in silence, and without looking behind you.”

“While some thirsty soul, after the manner of Bel in the Apocrypha, plays Nyssen and accepts the offering,” said the Captain.

“What! eat Nyssen’s offering! Tom, what do you say to that?”—for the men were still fidgetting about the fire,—“what do you say to that? The Captain thinks that one of you will eat up Nyssen’s cake; what do you say about it?”

“Well,” said Tom, “we have bold men in Norway, as all our histories will tell you; but bold as we are, I do not think you will get a man in the whole country to do that.”

“There was a young fellow once who did it in my country though,” said Jacob, “and dearly he paid for it. The family used to place the yearly gifts to Nyssen under the sails of their windmill every Christmas Eve;—you Norwegians do not know what windmills are; you grind all your corn by water, poor devils!”

Here Tom and Torkel, both Tellemarken men, broke in simultaneously; the one swearing that, in the Tellemark, windmills were as plenty as fir trees; the other vociferating, somewhat incongruously, that no nation two degrees from actual barbarism could ever think of such a piece of machinery at all.

Birger stilled their national animosities by wishing “The Thousand” would take them all three, and their windmills into the bargain, and Jacob went on with his story.

“The eldest son,” he said, “was a sad unbeliever; he had been a very good boy as long as he had lived with his father and mother at Lerum, but when he grew up he had gone to Copenhagen and got corrupted; for, as his honour Lieutenant Birger knows, they are all sad infidels at Copenhagen.” Here was likely to be another outbreak; for the Danes, though it is quite true that a great many of them are not only sceptics in fairy mythology but in religion also, are yet vehemently regretted by the Norwegians, who were in no ways pleased with that act of the Congress of Vienna which separated them from Denmark; a fact which our friend Jacob was perfectly aware of.

Peace was again effected by a vigorous kick from his fellow-countrymen, together with some observations respecting a donkey in a state of eternal condemnation; and Jacob went on as if nothing particular had happened.

“Well,” said he, “the young man found that the best ale and sweetest cake were always given to Nyssen, so he slipped out and gobbled them up himself. During the whole year that followed that Christmas, no great harm came of it, only there was always something wrong about the windmill; now a sail blown away, now a cog broken; there was plenty of grist, trade was lively enough, it was always something to do with the wind, and, as far as that was concerned, nothing went right. Still no one suspected the reason, till Christmas Eve came round again, and another sweet cake and another bottle of strong ale were placed under the mill for Nyssen. The night was as still and as quiet as this evening is,—quieter if possible; there was not a breath of wind, and the snow looked like a winding-sheet in the moonlight. Well, the young man slipped out again; but scarcely had he stooped to pick up the bottle, when a furious gust of wind arose, scattering the snow like flour out of a sack; the sails flew round as if they were mad; it was said that a figure in a pointed cap and a red jacket sat astride on the axle, and one of the sails taking the young man on the side of the head, threw him as far as I could fling a stone. He sank into the snow, which closed over him, and no one knew what had become of him till the thaw came on. It was very late that year, for the ground was not clear till Walpurgis’ Night, and then they found him, and Nyssen’s broken bottle still in his hand. It was by that they found out how it had happened. I would not be the man to touch anything belonging to Nyssen.”

“Nor I neither,” chimed in the two Norsemen.

“Johnstone and Maxwell both agree for once,” said the Parson, laughing; “and I will tell you another thing, neither would I. But now, Mr. Jacob, that we have done everything that can be expected of us by the spirits of the air, who, I hope, in common gratitude, will give us fishermen a cloudy sky and a little bit of a breeze to-morrow, I must say I should like to take my turn at the cakes and ale; so let us have whatever you have got in your big pot there, and bring us a bucket of strawberries and cream for dessert.”

The dinner was by no means so elaborate an affair as that of yesterday; this was occasioned, in some measure, by their want of sport, but, principally, because all had been far too much engaged in the necessary business of the camp to think much of eating. The solids, such as they were, that is to say, beef and pork, out of the harness cask, were soon despatched, and the huge camp kettle, one of the old-fashioned ante-Wellingtonian affairs, as big as a mortar, and nearly as heavy, was sent down to the men, while the fishermen lounged at full length on the turf, enjoying their rest over Jacob’s plentiful provision of strawberries and cream.

Fénélon has, somewhere or other, a fable about a man who had the power of procuring, “pour son argent,” as the good Bishop says, half-a-dozen men’s appetites and digestions. The man does not seem, in the fable, to have made a very good use of his extraordinary powers, or to have derived any extraordinary pleasure from them. If he had only come out campaigning in Norway, he might have had his five appetites for nothing, and been much the better for them all.

Meanwhile, the lower table did not at all seem to be in want of an appetite; the kettle was emptied, and whole heaps of flad-bröd, sour as verdjuice, and pots of butter, such as no nose or stomach, out of Norway, could tolerate, were fast disappearing beneath the unceasing attacks of seven gluttonous Scandinavians—while, as the twilight darkened, and diminished the restraint they might possibly have felt at the presence of their superiors, the noise grew louder and louder. Jacob began some interminable ballad about the sorrows and trials of little Kirstin, a very beautiful lady, who went through all sorts of misfortunes, and did not seem a “bit better than she should be;” but that goes for nothing at all in Swedish song, and very little in Swedish life. This he sang, chorus and all, to his own share. It seemed to affect the worthy man very little, that he was almost his own audience; no one seemed to attend him, but his song went on, stanza after stanza, uninterruptedly, forming a sort of running accompaniment to the shouts and screams of “Gammle Norgé,” “Wackere Lota, or, Kari,” which startled the echoes alternately, according as love, or patriotism, was the prevailing sentiment.

At last, they began drinking healths—“Skaal Herr Carblom,” “Skaal for the well-born singer;” for, like the old Spanish nobility, though they addressed one another as Tom, Piersen, and so forth, they always gave the interloper his full title.

“Jeg takker de,” said Jacob, solemnly, without, however, pausing for one moment in his song.

“Little Kirstin, she came to the bridal hall,—

We will begin with the wooing,—

And a little page answered to her call,

My best beloved, I ne’er can forget you”—

Here broke in Tom, beating time to his music with a horn which he had replenished to the very brim, and of which he was imparting the contents very liberally to the turf round him—

“Wet your clay, Andy!

Out with the brandy!

We live in jolly way,—

Here’s to you, night or day!

Look at sister Kajsa Stina,

See her bottles bright and clear-ah!

Take the horn, good fellow! grin-ah!

Grin and swill and drink like me!”

Jacob’s voice was again audible—

“She tied her horse in the garden there:

We will begin with the wooing”—

“Skaal Thorsen! skaal Tom Engelsk! skaal for the British navy!”

“Rule, Britannia!” shouted Tom. Jacob went on—

“We will begin with the wooing:

She brushed and—”

Here a general chorus—

“To the brim, young men! fill it up! fill again!

Drain! drain, young men!—’tis to Norway you drain.

Your fathers have sown it,

Your fields they have grown it;

Then quaff it, young men! for he’ll be the strongest

Who drinks of it deepest and sits at it longest.”

Jacob’s voice became audible, like a symphony, between the verses—

“She brushed and combed her golden hair,”—

when again rose up the wild chorus, overwhelming it under the volume of sound:

“To the brim, old men! fill it up! fill again!

Drain! drain, old men!—’tis to Norway you drain.

There’s health in the cup,—

Fill it up! fill it up!

And quaff it, old men! for he’ll live the longest

Who drinks of it deepest and likes it the strongest.”

“By the Harp of Bragi,” said Birger, “I’ll back old Jacob against the field,—that fellow has such bottom!” for the honest toper’s voice came again dreamily up the hill where they were sitting, during the pause that followed this outburst.

“Little Kirstin then passed out from the door,—

We had best begin with the wooing:

She said, I shall hither come no more,—

My best beloved! I never will forget thee.

Forth she went to the garden there,—

We had best begin with the wooing:

She hung herself with her golden hair,—

My best beloved! I never can forget thee.”

“Skaal for Birger! skaal for the brave Lieutenant! skaal for the royal guard!” shouted one, waxing more bold as the night drew on.

“Gammle Norgé!” screamed back an opponent, and immediately Torkel burst out, with his fine bass voice, into the national song, drowning entirely poor Jacob’s melancholy ditty, which never got much beyond the wooing after all.

“The hardy Norseman’s house of yore

Was on the foaming wave,

And there he gathered bright renown—

The bravest of the brave.

O, ne’er should we forget our sires,

Wherever we may be;

For they did win a gallant name,

And ruled the stormy sea.

What though our hands be weaker now

Than they were wont to be

When boldly forth our fathers sailed

And conquered Normandy?

We still may sing their deeds of fame,

In thrilling harmony;

They won for us that gallant name,

Ruling the stormy sea!”—

Enthusiasm was at its height, as the full chorus thundered forth from all the voices—

“Never will we forget our sires,

Wherever we may be;

They won for us that gallant name,

Ruling the stormy sea!”

Whether Jacob joined in it, or persevered in the sorrows of little Kirstin, it is impossible to say; but the loud-ringing alto of Birger came in tellingly from the house of the Nobles, accompanied by the bass of his two friends. The compliment was taken at once, “Skaal for the high-born Fishermen!” “Skaal for the noble gentlemen!” “Skaal for Victouria!” “Skaal for Carl Johann!” “Skaal for England!”

“Skaal for Sweden,” shouted Jacob at last.

“Gammle Norgé! Gammle Norgé! Sweden and Norway!—Sweden and Norway for ever! Skaal! Skaal!”

“Upon my word,” said the Parson, “some one must have been shelling out in good earnest. There goes something stronger than water to all that noise.”

“Well,” said Birger, “it is very true: they did their work this afternoon like men, and then, instead of going and buying brandy, and making beasts of themselves, they very properly sent Torkel as spokesman to me, and asked my permission to get drunk, which, as they had behaved so well, of course I granted them, and gave them five or six orts to buy brandy with.”

The Parson burst out laughing: “Well, Birger, it is very kind of you, to save them from making beasts of themselves: rather a novel way of doing it, though.”

“O, it is all right,” said Birger; “that is the way we always do in my country, we get it over at once: they will be as sober as judges after this—if we had not indulged them when they knew they had deserved it, they would always have been hankering after brandy, and dropping off drunk when they were most wanted: they will be as sober as judges after this, I tell you,” he reiterated, observing a slight smile of incredulity on the faces of both his companions.

“I do not feel quite so confident of their being as sober as judges to-morrow, as I do about their being as drunk as pigs to-night,” said the Captain; “though, to be sure, I do not know what judges are in Norway; but it does seem to me that five or six orts[12] are rather a liberal allowance, in a country where one can get roaring drunk for half-a-dozen skillings.”

“That is just the very thing I do not want them to do,” said Birger. “Whenever a Norseman gets roaring drunk, he is sure to kick up a row: it is very much better that they should get beastly drunk at once; then they go to sleep and sleep it off, and no one the wiser.”

“I should have thought, though,” said the Captain, “that you gave them quite enough for that, and a good remainder for another day into the bargain.”

“It is little you know of the Norwegian, then,” said Birger, “or, for the matter of that, of the Swede either: he is not the man to make two bites of a cherry, or to leave his brandy in the bottom of the keg. Besides, they will consider themselves upon honour. They asked my leave to get drunk on this particular night, and I gave them the money to do it with; it would be absolute swindling, to get drunk with my money on any other occasion.”

“Upon my word,” said the Captain, “this a terrible drawback to your beautiful country. Our fellows in Ireland used to get drunk now and then, to be sure, but they had always the grace to be ashamed of it. These scoundrels do it in such a business-like way.”

“Your countryman, Laing, sets that down to the score of our virtues,” said Birger. “He considers it much better to act upon principle, like our people, than to yield to temptation, as your English and Irish sots do. I must say, though, that he is not half so indulgent to us poor Swedes.”

“My countryman, Laing,” said the Parson, “though a very observant traveller, is, also, a very extreme republican and a very prejudiced writer. He gives us facts in monarchical Sweden, as well as in republican Norway, and he gives them as he sees them, no doubt; but, he looks at the two countries through glasses of different tints. Now, my idea is, that, in point of drunkenness, there is not a pin to choose.”

“Yes, but there is, though,” said Birger. “The Norwegian is quarrelsome in his cups; and you will seldom find that in any part of Sweden, unless in Scånia, and the Scånians are half Danes yet. I had the precaution to take away those gentlemen’s knives when I gave them the money for their brandy (and, I must admit, they gave them up with very good grace), or, the chances are, that we should have lost the services of that ass Jacob, and given a job for the Landamptman to-morrow. Why, half the party-coloured gentlemen in the castle at Christiania have earned their iron decorations in some drunken brawl or other.”[13]

“Well, that may be,” said the Parson. “I have not experienced enough to gainsay you; but you must admit that as far as simple drinking goes, the two nations have the organ of drunkenness pretty equally developed.”

“I should think it must be a barrel organ, then,” said the Captain, “if we are to judge by the quantity it contains.”

“Thank your stars it has got a good many stops in it. The Scandinavian does not drink irregularly, like your people whom you can never reckon upon for two days together. He has his days of solemn drunkenness—some of them political, such as the coronation; or the king’s name day; or, here, in Norway, the signing of their cursed constitution. Some of them, again, are religious—such as Christmas, and Easter, and Whitsuntide: these are days in which all Scandinavia gets drunk as one man. And there are a few little domestic anniversaries besides—such as christenings and weddings; but, this is all, except a chance affair, like this; so that, by a glance at the calendar, and a little inquiry into a man’s private history, you may always know when to find him sober, and fit for work.”

“Sober, meaning three or four glasses of brandy?” said the Parson.

“Yes,” said Birger. “He seldom goes beyond that, on ordinary days; and, therefore, on festivals like this, I think him very well entitled to make up for it.”

“I think, though,” said the Parson, “when I was in Sweden, last year, I did see such things as stocks for drunkards, at some of the church doors.”

“Yes, you did, at all of them; but, you never saw any one in them. How is a mayor to order a man into the stocks, for drunkenness, when the chances are, that he was just as drunk himself on the very same occasion?”

“How do you account for this universal system of drinking spirits?” said the Captain.

“It is easy enough to account for it,” said the Parson; for Birger rather shirked the question. “Every landed proprietor has a right to a private still; the duty is a farthing a gallon, carriage is difficult, and brandy is much more portable than corn. Will not this account for some of it? I do not happen to know what may be the return for Sweden; but, for Norway, it is somewhat over five million gallons a-year, in a country which does not grow nearly enough of corn to support itself; and this, as the population does not come up to a million and a-half, gives three and a-half gallons per Christian, to every man, woman, and child, in the country.”

“Come, come,” said Birger, “if you go to statistics, look at home. Your Mr. Hume moved, last session, for a return of all the men that had been picked up, drunk, in the course of the preceding year; and, in Glasgow alone, there were nearly fifteen thousand—that is to say, one out of every twenty-two of the whole population. Do not talk to us of drunkenness. Did you ever hear of the controversy between the pot and the kettle?”

“The Scotch are no more our countrymen, than the Norwegians are yours,” said the Parson; “and, if I recollect right, that very return gave no more than one in every six hundred, picked up, drunk, in our Manchester; and Manchester is not what we call a moral place, either.”[14]

“In that very place, Glasgow,” said the Captain, “where, for my sins, I was quartered last year, I was actually taken up before the magistrates, and fined five shillings, for what the hypocritical sinners call ‘whustling on the Saubboth,’ and it was only Saturday night, either—the rascally Jews! They are fellows to

Compound for sins they are inclined to

By damning those they have no mind to.

The scoundrels couldn’t whistle a tune themselves on any day of the week, ‘were it their neck verse at Hairibee;’ they have no notion of music, beyond the bagpipe and the Scotch fiddle.”

“Five shillings?” said the Parson, musingly; “that is just the sum they fine people, in London, for being drunk and disorderly.”

“Then, in all human probability, the Captain made one individual item in Mr. Hume’s fifteen thousand himself.”

“Very possibly,” said the Captain. “It was Saturday night, and I will not say I might not have been a little screwed. When one is in Turkey one must live as turkeys live.”

“Well,” said the Parson, “I believe all northern nations have a natural turn for drunkenness, but laws and regulations may increase or diminish the amount of it; and the laws of both these countries tend most particularly to increase it. With you it is a regular case of ‘Drunkenness made easy.’ Besides, public opinion sets that way too. If I were suspected of anything approaching to the state of our friends down below, I never could face my parish again. Your parish priest might be carried home and tucked into bed by a dozen of his faithful and hard-headed parishioners on Saturday night, and if the thing did not come round too often, would get up not a pin the worse on Sunday morning, either in health or in reputation.”

“I think,” said the Captain, “public presents are a very fair test of public propensities. In the snuffy days of the last century and the beginning of this, every public character, from the Duke of Wellington down to William Cobbett, had the freedoms of all sorts of things given them in golden snuff-boxes. Now, look at your people. When your king paid a visit to the University of Upsala, the most appropriate present he could think of making to that learned body, was an ancient drinking-horn,—of course, by way of encouraging the national tastes. And when he made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Odin and Freya, the most appropriate present which that learned body could make to him in their turn, was another ancient drinking-horn, which had the additional value of having once been the property of those heroic, but, if there is any truth in Sagas, exceedingly drunken divinities.”

“Well, well,” said Birger, good-humouredly (and it must be said that his was a case of good-humour under difficulties), “every nation has its own national sins to answer for, and it is no use for me to deny that ours is drunkenness. But what else can you expect from a people whose ideal of the joys of heaven used to be fighting all day, and after a huge dinner of boiled pork, getting beastly drunk upon beer? Gangler, in the prose Edda, asks Har, ‘How do your Heroes pass their time in Valhalla when they are not drinking?’ And Har replies, ‘Every day, as soon as they have dressed themselves, they ride out into the court, and fight till they cut each other in pieces. This is their pastime; but when meal-time approaches, they return to drink in Valhalla.’ Or, if you will have the same in verse, this is what the Vafthrudnis Mal says:—

The Einherjir all,

On Odin’s plain,

Hew daily each other

While chosen the slain are;

From the fray they then ride,

And drink ale with the Œsir.”

“After all,” said the Parson, “this is nothing more than a ghostly tournament; and I have no doubt but that the haughty tournaments of the middle ages, if deprived of their mediæval gilding, would be very like the hewings, ale swillings, and pork banquetings of the Einherjir. I hope, though, that they brewed good ale in Asgard.”

“I dare say,” said the Captain, “that, after their carousal, they wanted a little sleep to fit them for the toils of the next day; I am sure I do, and I vote we try what sort of couches Birger has prepared for us. Our once merry friends below seem to be as fast asleep as swine now, and as quiet. To tell you the truth, I am a little tired with our day’s work, and we certainly have another good day’s work cut out for us to-morrow.”

“With all my heart,” said Birger, finishing off what, from its colour, might have been a glass of water, but was not. As Odin says—

“No one will charge thee

With evil, if early

Thou goest to slumber.”

“Come along, then,” said the Captain, “turn in; and may the Nyss to whom we have sacrificed send us to-morrow ‘a southerly wind and a cloudy sky.’”

There are several national songs in Norway. That which Torkel sings is an ancient song, and has been adapted and arranged as a chorus, by Hullah; but it is not that which is generally known as “Gammle Norgé.” This, though eminently popular, is but a modern composition. Its author is Bjerregaard, a Norse poet of some eminence. It has been thus rendered into English by Mr. Latham:—

Minstrel, awaken the harp from its slumbers!

Strike for old Norway, the land of the free!

High and heroic in soul-stirring numbers,

Clime of our fathers, we strike it for thee!

Old recollections

Awake our affections,—

They hallow the name of the land of our birth;

Each heart beats its loudest,

Each cheek glows its proudest,

For Norway the Ancient, the Throne of the Earth!

Spirit! look back on her far-flashing glory,

The far-flashing meteor that bursts on thy glance,

On chieftain and hero immortal in story,

They press to the battle like maids to the dance.

The blood flows before them,

The wave dashes o’er them,

They reap with the sword what they plough with the keel;

Enough that they leave

To the country that bore them

Bosoms to bleed for her freedom and weal.

The Shrine of the Northman, the Temple of Freedom,

Stands like a rock where the stormy wind breaks;

The tempests howl round it, but little he’ll heed them,—

Freely he thinks, and as freely he speaks.

The bird in its motion,

The wave in its ocean,

Scarcely can rival his liberty’s voice;

Yet he obeys,

With a willing devotion

Laws of his making and kings of his choice.

Land of the forest, the fell, and the fountain,—

Blest with the wealth of the field and the flood,—

Steady and truthful, the sons of thy mountain,

Pay the glad price of thy rights with their blood.

Ocean hath bound thee,

Freedom hath found thee,—

Flourish, old Norway, thy flag be unfurled!

Free as the breezes

And breakers around thee—

The pride of thy children, the Throne of the World!

CHAPTER IX.
THE HELL FALL.

“If thou hadst not been leading a life of sin—

The sun shines over Enen—

Thou wouldst have given me water thy bare hand within—

Under the linden green.

Now, this is the penance that on thee I lay:

Eight years in the wood shalt thou live from this day,

And no food shall pass thy lips between,

Save only the leaves of the linden green;

And no other drink shalt thou have at all,

Save the dew on the linden leaves so small;

And no other bed shall be pressed by thee,

Save only the roots of the linden tree.

When eight long years were gone and spent,

Jesus the Lord to Magdalene went—

Now shall Heaven’s mercy thee restore—

The sun shines over Enen—

Go, Magdalena, and sin no more

Under the linden green.”

Svenska Folk-visor.

Whether the Spirits of the Flood and Fell considered themselves complimented by the homage which had been paid to them, or whether things would have turned out exactly the same had there been no offering at all, is a mystery of mythology which we will not take upon ourselves to determine. Certain it is, that when the next morning was ushered in with a soft westerly breeze and a dull cloudy sky, interspersed with bright transient gleams of joyous sunshine, such as salmon love, the Nyssar got the credit of it all. Not that the Norwegians were at first aware of the extent of their blessings, for the barbarians are all unversed in the mysteries of fly-fishing, but they were not long in finding it out, from the smiling looks and congratulatory expressions of their employers.

Englishmen might have felt dull and heavy after the consumption of such enormous quantities of brandy: English heads might have ached, and English hands might have felt shaky during the operation of getting sober. Thor himself could not have risen from the challenge cup, set before him by Loki Utgard, with more complete self-possession than did Tom and Torkel, and the mighty Jacob. Sleep and drink had fled with the shades of night, and it was a steady hand that served out the coffee that morning.

The party had long separated to their respective pursuits, for the impatience of the fishermen and the actual dearth of provisions in the camp did not allow of idling.

Towards noon the breeze had entirely sunk, and the sun, having succeeded in dispelling the clouds, was shining in its summer strength into the confined valley, concentrating its rays from the encircling rocks upon the channel of the river, and pouring them on the encampment as on the focus of a burning-glass.

It was not, however, a depressing, moist, stewing heat; there was a lightness and elasticity in the air unknown in southern climes, or if known at all, known only on the higher Alps, and in the middle of the summer. Men felt the heat, no doubt, and the thermometer indicated a high degree of temperature; but there was nothing in it enervating, nothing predisposing to slothfulness or inaction; on the contrary, the nerves seemed braced under it, and the spirits buoyant. Work and exercise were a pleasure, not a toil; and if the Parson did stretch himself out under the shade of the great birch tree, it was the natural result of a well-spent morning of downright hard work. Wielding a flail is a trifle compared to wielding a salmon rod; and he and the Captain had, both of them, wielded it that morning to some purpose, for the salmon had not been unmindful of the soft breeze and the cloudy skies, but had risen to the fly with appetites truly Norwegian.

Jacob and Torkel, with one of the boatmen in the distance, were up to their eyes in salt and blood, cleaning, splitting, salting, and otherwise preparing the spare fish for a three days’ sojourn in the smoking-house; while three or four bright-looking fresh run salmon, selected from the heap, and ready crimped for the kettle or toasting skewers, were glittering from under the green and constantly-wetted branches, with which they were protected from the heat of the day.

Birger, who was much more at home with his gun than with his fishing-rod, had gone out that morning early, attended by his two men, in order to reconnoitre the country, and see what its capabilities were; for the Parson’s report had been confined to its excellencies as a fishing station. The Captain was still on the river; every now and then distant glimpses of his boat could be seen as he shifted from throw to throw, and occasionally condescended even to harl the river, by way of resting his arms. Such a fishing morning as they had enjoyed, is not often to be met with, and the Captain would not take the hint which the cloudless sun had been giving him for the last half-hour.

The Parson, whose rod was pitched in a neighbouring juniper, and whose fly, a sober dark-green, as big as a bird, floated out faintly in the expiring breeze, was stretched at full length on the turf, occupied, so far as a tired man who is resting himself can be said to be occupied at all, in watching the motions of a little red-headed woodpecker, that was darting from branch to branch and from tree to tree, making the forest ring again with its sharp succession of taps, as it drove the insects out of their hiding-places beneath the outside bark. Taps they were, no doubt, and given by the bird’s beak, too, but by no means like the distinct and deliberate tap of the yellow woodpecker, every one of which may be counted: so rapid were they, that they sounded more like the scrooping of a branch torn violently from the tree, and so loud, that it was difficult to conceive that such a sound could be caused by a bird comparatively so diminutive.

The woodpecker, which seemed almost tame and by no means disconcerted by the presence of strangers, pursued its occupation with the utmost confidence, though quite within reach of the Parson’s rod.

“Take care,” said the Parson, as Torkel approached, “do not disturb it.”

“Disturb what?” said Torkel.

The Parson pointed to the woodpecker, which was not a dozen yards from them. The bird paused a moment, and looked at them, but evinced no symptoms of timidity.

“What, the Gertrude-bird?” said Torkel; “no one would disturb her while working out her penance, poor thing! She knows that well enough; look at her.” And, in truth, the bird did seem to know it, for another loud rattle of taps formed an appropriate accompaniment to Torkel’s speech; though Birger and the Captain at that moment came up, the one with his last fish, the other with a couple of ducks, a tjäder, and two brace of grouse, of one sort or another, which he had met with during his morning’s exploration.

The Parson nodded to the Captain, congratulated Birger, but, ever ready for a legend, turned round to Torkel.

“What do you mean by a Gertrude-bird, and what is her penance?” said he.

Birger smiled—not unbelievingly, though; for the legend is as well known in Sweden as it is in Norway; and few people, in either of these countries, who believe in anything at all, are altogether sceptical on matters of popular superstition.

“That bird,” said Torkel, “or at least her ancestors, was once a woman; and it is a good lesson that she reads us every time we see her. God grant that we may all be the better for it,” he added, reverentially.

“One day she was kneading bread, in her trough, under the eaves of her house, when our Lord passed by, leaning on St. Peter. She did not know that it was the Lord and his Apostle, for they looked like two poor men, who were travelling past her cottage door.”

“‘Give us of your dough, for the love of God,’ said the Lord Christ; ‘we have come far across the fjeld, and have fasted long!’

“Gertrude pinched off a small piece for them, but on rolling it on her trough to get it into shape, it grew and grew, and filled up the trough completely. She looked at it in wonder. ‘No,’ said she, ‘that is more than you want;’ so she pinched off a smaller piece, and rolled it out as before; but the smaller piece filled up the trough, just as the other had done, and Gertrude put it aside, too, and pinched a smaller bit still. But the miracle was just the same; the smaller bit filled up the trough as full as the largest-sized kneading that she had ever put in it.

“Gertrude’s heart was hardened still more; she put that aside too, resolving, so soon as the strangers had left her, to divide all her dough into little bits, and to roll it out into great loaves. ‘I cannot give you any to-day,’ said she; ‘go on your journey, and the Lord prosper you, but you must not stop at my house.’

“Then the Lord Christ was angry; and her eyes were opened, and she saw whom she had forbidden to come into her house, and she fell down on her knees; but the Lord said, ‘I gave you plenty, but that hardened your heart, so plenty was not a blessing to you; I will try you now with the blessing of poverty; you shall from henceforth seek your food day by day, and always between the wood and the bark.[15] But forasmuch as I see your penitence to be sincere, this shall not be for ever: as soon as your back is entirely clothed in mourning this shall cease, for by that time you will have learned to use your gifts rightly.’

“Gertrude flew from the presence of the Lord, for she was already a bird, but her feathers were blackened already, from her mourning; and from that time forward she and her descendants have, all the year round, sought their food between the wood and the bark; but the feathers of their back and wings get more mottled with black as they grow older; and when the white is quite covered the Lord Christ takes them for his own again. No Norwegian will ever hurt a Gertrude-bird, for she is always under the Lord’s protection, though he is punishing her for the time.”

“Bravo, Torkel,” said the Parson. “I could not preach a better sermon than that myself, or give you sounder theology.”

“You seem always on the look-out for a superstition,” said the Captain.

“So I am,” said the Parson. “There is nothing that displays the character of a people so well as their national legends.”

“But do you not consider that in lending your countenance to them, and looking as if you believed them, you are lending your countenance to superstition itself?”

“Well,” said the Parson, “what would you have me do? laugh them out of it, like Miss Martineau? And if I succeeded in that, which I should not, what should I have done then? Why, opened a fallow for scepticism. Superstition is the natural evidence of the Unseen in the minds of the ignorant; to be superstitious, is to believe in a Being superior to ourselves; and this is in itself the first step to spiritual advancement. Inform the mind, teaching it to distinguish the true from the false, and superstition—that is to say, the reverence for the unseen—brightens into true religion. Take it away by force, or quench it by ridicule, and you have an unoccupied corner of the soul for every bad passion to take root in. Superstition is the religion of the ignorant.”

“Well, there is truth in that,” said the Captain. “When a boy becomes a man, he will not play prison-base, or go a bird’s-nesting; but prison-base and bird’s-nesting are no bad preparation for manly daring and gallant enterprise.”

“Very true; and when the boy is capable of the latter he will leave off his prison-base and bird’s-nesting without any trouble on your part.”

“There are good superstitions as well as bad,” said Birger. “To be afraid of thinning down a noxious bird, like the magpie, as our people are, because the devil has them under his protection, is a bad superstition. It is a distrust in the power and providence of God; but, though it is equally a superstition to imagine that one bird is more a favourite with God than another, yet the boy who, in your country, in the ardour of his first shooting expedition, turns aside his gun because

Cock-robins and kitty-wrens

Are God Almighty’s cocks and hens;

or, in our country, from the Gertrude-bird, because she is working out the penance which Christ has imposed upon her, has, in so doing, exercised self-denial, has acknowledged the existence of a God, and has admitted the sanctity of His protection. Many a superstition has as good a moral as a parable, and this is one of them.”

The approach of dinner at once scared away the Gertrude-bird, and put an end to Birger’s moralising; and as they discussed the pink curdy salmon, the produce of the morning’s sport, and revelled in the anticipation of strawberry and raspberry jam, the fumes of which every now and then were wafted to them from the kitchen, and in the certainty of roast game and smoked fish for future consumption, they laid their plans for the afternoon’s sport.

The sun was still shining in its strength and cloudlessness, and bade fair so to shine for the rest of the day; and the breeze, which had been for some time failing, had now sunk into a perfect calm. No salmon or trout were to be caught by the usual means—that was clear enough. Jacob, however, who had procured what might be called with great propriety a kettle of fish, for he had borrowed from a neighbouring farm-house one of the kettles in which they simmer their milk, and had got it full of minnows and other small fry—proposed setting his långref. This was unanimously assented to, for occupation is pleasing, and so is variety; and eels, pike, and flounders, which were likely to be its produce, were no bad additions to a larder less remarkable for the variety of its provisions than for their abundance.

But the grand scheme was one proposed by the Captain, who had been reconnoitring the higher parts of the river, and had discovered a very likely place for a bright day, but one which could not be reached from the shore, or by any of the ordinary means of propelling a boat. It was a fall terminating, not as falls generally do, in a huge basin, but in a shoot or rapid of considerable length, like a gigantic mill race, which, after a straight but turbulent course of a couple of hundred yards, shot all at once into the middle of a round and eddying pool. It was called the Hell Fall, probably from its fury, for the word is Norske; but possibly also, from Hela’s Fall, Hela being the Goddess of Darkness; and well did the yawning chasm, through which the waters rushed, deserve that name, overshadowed as it was by its black walls of rock. It was upon this that the Captain had reckoned; whatever were the case with the rest of the world, sunshine or storm must be alike to it, and to the tenants of its gloomy recesses.

The Captain was confident the thing could be done, and the Parson was as confident that if it could be done, and the fly introduced into the numerous turn-holes round which the water boiled and bubbled, the rapid would require neither cloud nor wind to make it practicable. And Birger, who was a great man at contrivances, asseverated strongly that it should be done.

The first job, however, was to set the långref, and that was a mode of poaching with which they were all familiar. The långref, a line of two or three hundred fathoms in length, with a snood and a hook at each fathom, was baited from the minnow kettle, and coiled, so that the baited hooks lay together on a board; and one end having been made fast to a stump on the landing place, the boat was pulled diagonally down and across the stream, and the line gradually paid out in such a manner that the hooks were carried by the current, so as to hang free of the back line; the other end, which came within a few yards of the farther bank, was anchored by a heavy stone, backed by a smaller one, and the whole affair left to fish for itself.

In the meanwhile, some of the men had been sent forward with ropes, and with the boat-hooks and oars belonging to the expedition; for, though boats are always procurable in a place where the river forms the usual means of communication, their gear is not always to be relied on in cases of difficulty.

The fishermen selected their short lake rods, as better adapted to the work they were going about than the great two-handed salmon rods with which they had been fishing that morning; and having fitted fresh casting lines, which, in consideration of the work they were going about, were of the strongest twisted gut they could find, they took the path up the river.

“I wonder what are the proper flies of this river,” said the Captain. “In Scotland every place has its own set of flies, and you are always told that you will do nothing at all, unless you get the very colours and the very flies peculiar to the river.”

“You seem to have done pretty well on this river, at all events,” said Birger, “without any such information.”

“No information is to be despised,” said the Parson. “The oldest fisherman will always find something to be learnt from men who have passed their lives on a particular stream, and have studied it from their boyhood. There is, however, only one general principle, and that will always hold good. By this the experienced fisherman will never be at a loss about suiting his fly to the water. Here is the Captain now; we have had no consultation, and yet I will venture to say that we are both fishing with flies of a similar character. What fly did you catch your fish with, this morning, Captain?”

“I have been using my old Scotch flies,” said the Captain, “such as they tie on the Tay and Spey,[16] and the largest of the sort I could find.”

“To be sure you did; and tell Birger why you did not use your Irish flies.”

“They were too gaudy for the water,” said the Captain.

“That, Birger, will give you the principle,” said the Parson. “The Captain has been very successful with flies belonging to another river; now, look at mine, which I tied last night, while I was waiting till you came home from sacrificing to Nyssen. Except in size, this is as different as possible from the Captain’s; and yet its principle is precisely the same; mine is a green silk body, black hackle, blackcock wing, no tinsel, and nothing bright about it, except this single golden pheasant topping for a tail. Now, the Tay flies are quite different to look at; they are mostly brown or dun pig’s wool bodies, with natural red or brown hackles and mallard wings; but the principle of both is the same; they are sober, quiet flies, with no glitter or gaudiness about them; and the Captain shall tell you what induced him to select such as these.”

“I chose the largest fly I could find,” said the Captain; “because the water here is very deep and strong; and as the salmon lies near the bottom, I must have a large fly to attract his attention; but I must not have a gaudy fly, because the water is so clear that the sparkle of the tinsel would be more glittering than anything in nature; and the fish, when he had risen and come near enough to distinguish it, would be very apt to turn short.”

“You have it now, precisely,” said the Parson; “the depth of the water regulates the size of the fly, and the clearness of the water its colours. This rule, of course, is not without exceptions; if it were, there would be no science in fishing. The sun, the wind, the season, the state of the atmosphere must also be taken into consideration; for instance, this rapid we are going to fish now, is the very same water we have been fishing in below, and therefore just as clear, but it is rough, and overhung by rocks and trees. I mean, therefore, to put on a gayer fly than anything we have used hitherto. But here we are,” he said, as they looked down upon the rush of waters, “and upon my word, an ugly place it is.”

The Parson might well say that, for the waters were rushing below with frightful rapidity. Above them was the fall, where the river, compressed into a narrow fissure, shot through it like an enormous spout, into a channel, wider certainly than the spout itself, but still very narrow; while the perpendicular walls reminded the spectators of an artificial lock right in the middle of the stream; at the very foot of the fall, was a solid rock, on the back of which the waters heaped themselves up, and found their way into the straight channel by rushing round it. In fact, without this check, their rapidity would have been too great for anything to swim in them; and as it was they looked anything but inviting.

“A very awkward place!” said the Parson! “and how do you mean to fish this?”

“Come away a little from the roar of the waters,” said the Captain, “and I will explain my plans. You see that flat ledge of rock below us, just above the rush of the water; that spot we can reach by means of the rope. Make it fast to that tree, Tom: you learned knotting in the English navy, you know.”

Tom grinned, and did as he was told, and the Captain ascertained the strength of his work practically, by climbing down the face of the rock, and reconnoitring personally the ledge he had pointed out.

“Now,” said he, when he had returned, “we will get the boat as near as we can to this rush of water, and then veer out a rope to her from this rock: birch ropes will float, and the stream is quite sufficient to carry it down. If we make the boat fast to this, we may command every inch of the rapid, and you see yourself, how many turn-holes are made by the points of the rock which project from either side. You may depend upon it, every one of these contains a salmon, and the water is so troubled and covered with foam, that not one of these fish will know or care whether the sun is shining or not.”

“I think your reasoning is sound enough,” said the Parson; “but if the boat capsizes, the best swimmer in Norway would be drowned, or knocked to pieces against these rocky points.”

HELL FALL.

[p. 119.]

“But what is to capsize the boat? I am not going to take young hands with me; we all know our work; at all events, I mean to make the first trial of my own plan myself, you have nothing to do but to stand on the rock, and haul up the boat.”

The Parson looked at Birger.

“I do not think there is much danger,” said he; “and if the Captain will manage the rod, I will see to the boat. Tom shall take the other oar.”

“Well,” said the Parson, “you have left me the safest job; but I do not quite like to see you do it. However, I suppose you will; so here goes to see that you run no more danger than is absolutely necessary.” So saying, he eased himself down the rope to the flat rock, followed by Torkel and Pierson, who had previously thrown down a coil of birch rope; while the Captain, Birger, and Tom went down to the place below the rapid, where the boat was moored to a stump of a tree that grew over the river.

The birch rope floated on the top of the racing water, and soon reached the great turn-hole below the rapid, where the current was not so furious but that the boat could easily be managed. After one or two misses, Birger caught the end of it with his boat-hook, and, passing it round all the thwarts, secured it to the aftermost one; placing an axe in the stern sheets, in which the Captain had seated himself with his short lake-rod in his hand, Tom sat amidships with the paddles, while Birger himself stood forward with the boat-hook, to fend off from any point of rock that the eddies might sheer the boat against.

When all was ready, he waved his cap—for no voice could be heard amid the roar of water—and the Parson and his party began steadily hauling on the rope. The boat entered the dark cleft, and, though her progress was very slow, cut a feather through the water, as if she were racing over it.

Tom, by dipping one or other paddle, steered from side to side, as he was bid; and the Captain threw his fly into the wreaths of foam which gathered in the dark corners; for in the most furious of rapids, there will always be spots of water perfectly stationary, where the eddies, that have been turned off by projecting rocks, meet again the main current; and, in those places, the salmon will invariably rest themselves, accomplishing their passage, as it were, by stages.

From side to side swung the boat—now at rest, now hauled upon by the line, according to the messages which Birger telegraphed with his cap; but, for some time, without any result, except that of convincing the Parson that the dangers he apprehended, were more in appearance than in reality; so that they were beginning to think that their ingenuity would be the sole reward of their pains. At length, there was a sudden tug at the line, the water was far too agitated to permit the rise to be seen, and the Captain’s rod bent like a bow.

“Haul up, a few fathoms,” said he, raising his rod so as to get his line, as much as possible, out of the action of the water, which was forcing it into a bight. “Now, steer across, Tom, to the opposite side. We must try the strength of the tackle—‘Pull for the half,’ as we say in Ireland.”

The fish had not attempted to run, knowing that its best chance of safety was in the hole in which it lay, but had sunk sulkily to the bottom. No sooner, however, did the boat feel the current on her bow, than she sheered across to the opposite side; and the Captain, stopping his line from running out, drew the salmon by main force from its shelter, who, feeling the strength of the current, for a moment attempted to stem it; but soon, the Captain, adroitly dropping his hand, turned tail and raced away, downward, with the combined velocity of the stream, and its own efforts.

The Captain paused a moment, to make sure that the fish was in earnest, and then cut the rope; and boat, fish, and all, came tumbling down the rapid into the turn-hole below.

Once there, it became an ordinary trial of skill between man and fish—such as always occurs whenever a salmon is hooked in rough water—and that the Captain was well up to. It was impossible for it again to head up the dangerous ground of the rapid, or to face the rush of the waters with the strain of the line upon it; so it raced backwards and forwards, and up and down in the deep pool, while Tom took advantage of every turn to paddle his boat quietly into still water. At last, the Captain succeeded in turning his fish under a projecting tree, upon which the Parson, who, as soon as he had seen the turn matters were likely to take, had shinned up the rope, and hurried to the scene of action, was standing gaff in hand to receive it.

“Well done, all hands!” said the Captain, as the Parson freed his gaff from the back fin of a twenty-pound salmon, and Birger hooked on to the tree, and brought his boat to shore. “Well done, all hands! it was no easy matter to invade such territories as that; but one wants a little additional excitement after such a fishing morning as we have had.”

“I think we may set you down as bene meritus de patriâ,” said the Parson; “it is just as well to have a fresh resource on a bright afternoon like this; the time may come when we may want it.”

“Now, then, for another fish,” said the Captain; “Birger shall try his hand at the rod this time.”

Birger would have excused himself on account of his want of skill, but was very easily persuaded, and, thus they took turns, now securing a fish, now cutting a line against an unseen rock, now losing one by downright hard pulling, till, when the light began to fail, and the dangers to grow more real from the darkness, they made fast their boat to the stump, and returned victorious to the camp, having added three or four fish to their store, and those the finest they had caught that day.[17]

CHAPTER X.
DEPARTURE FROM TORJEDAHL.

“Og Trolde, Hexer, Nysser i hver Vraae.”

Finn Magnussen.

And Witches, Trolls, and Nysses in each nook.

“Hallo! what is the matter now?” said the Captain, who had been out with his gun that morning, and on his return caught sight of the Parson sitting disconsolate on the river’s bank. By the waters of Torjedahl we sat down and wept. “What has gone wrong?”

“Why, everything has gone wrong,” said the Parson peevishly; “look at my line.”

“You do seem to have lost your casting line, certainly.”

“Yes, I have, and half my reel line beside.”

“Very tinkerish, I dare say, but do not grieve over it; put on a new one and hold your tongue about it; no one saw you, and I promise not to tell.”

“How can you be so absurd?” said the Parson, “look at the river, and tell me how we are to fish that; just look at those baulks of timber floating all over it. I had on as fine a fish as ever I saw in my life,—five-and-twenty pounds if he was an ounce, when down came these logs, and one of them takes my reel line, with sixty yards out, and cuts it right in the middle.”

“Well, that is provoking,” said the Captain, “enough to make a saint swear, let alone a parson; but, hang it, man, it is only once in the way. Come along, do not look behind you; I am in a hurry to be at it myself, I came home on purpose, I was ashamed to waste so glorious a fishing day as this in the fjeld.”

“That is just the thing that annoys me,” said the Parson; “it is, as you say, a most lovely fishing day,—I never saw a more promising one; and I have just heard that these logs will take three days floating by at the very least, and while they are on the river I defy the best fisherman in all England to land anything bigger than a graul.”

“Why,” said the Captain, “have the scoundrels been cutting a whole forest?”

“This is what Torkel tells me,” said the Parson; “he says that in the winter they cut their confounded firs, and when the snow is on the ground they just square them, haul them down to the river or its tributaries, where they leave them to take care of themselves, and when the ice melts in the spring, down come the trees with it. But there are three or four lakes, it seems, through which this river passes—that, by-the-by, is the reason why it is so clear; and, as the baulks would be drifting all manner of ways when they got into these lakes, and would get stranded on the shores instead of going down the stream, they make what they call a boom at or near the mouth of the river, that is to say, they chain together a number of baulks, end-ways, and moor them in a bight across the river, so that they catch everything that floats. Here they get hold of the loose baulks, make them into rafts, and navigate them along the lakes, launching them again into the river at the other end, and catching them again at the next boom in the same way. They have, it seems, just broken up the contents of one of these booms above us. It will take three days to clear it out, and another day for the straggling pieces.”

“Whew!” said the Captain, “three blessed days taken from the sum of our lives; what on earth is to be done?”

“Well,” said the Parson, “that is exactly what we must see about, for it is quite certain that there is nothing to be done on the water. Before I began grumbling I sent off Torkel to look for Birger—for we must hold a council of war upon it. O! there is Birger,” said he, as they crossed the little rise which forms the head of the Aal Foss and came in sight of the camp and the river below it; “Torkel must have missed him.”

“Hallo!” said Birger, who was with Piersen in one of the boats, fishing up with his boat-hook the back line of the långref, and apparently he had made an awkward mess of it—“hallo there! get another boat and come and help me, these baulks have played Old Scratch with the långref; it has made a goodly catch, too, last night, as far as I can see, but we want more help to get it in.”

The Parson had the discretion to keep his own counsel, but the fact was, it was he who was the cause both of the abundant catch and of the present trouble. The small eels had been plaguing them, for some nights successively, by sucking off and nibbling to pieces baits which they were too small to swallow, and thus preventing the larger fish from getting at them. The Parson had seen this, and had set his wits to work to circumvent them. By attaching corks to the back line, he had floated the hooks above the reach of the eels, which he knew would never venture far from the bottom, while pike, gös, id, perch, the larger eels, and occasionally even trout, would take the floating bait more readily when they found it in mid-water.

This would have done exceedingly well, had he looked at it early in the morning; that, however, he had not exactly forgotten, but had neglected to do. Time was precious, and he was unwilling to waste it on hauling the långref. Jacob, whose business it was to haul it, had been sent down to Christiansand on the preceding day, with two of the boatmen, for supplies, and had not yet returned; and the Parson, holding his tongue about his experiment, and proposing to himself the pleasure of hauling the långref when the mid-day sun should be too hot for salmon-fishing, had gone out early with his two-handed rod. In the meanwhile the baulks had come down, and the very first of them, catching the centre of the floating bight, had cut it in two, and had thus permitted the whole of the Parson’s great catch of fish to entangle themselves at their pleasure.

[p. 124.]

It was these disjecta membra that Birger was busying himself about; the task was not an easy one; and if it were, the guardsman was not altogether a proficient. But, even when the reinforcement arrived, there was nothing to be done beyond lifting the whole tangle bodily into the boat, releasing the fish from the hooks, and then, partly by patience, partly by a liberal use of the knife, to get out the tangle on shore. The further half gave them the most trouble to find; it had been moored to a stone, and the back line had been strong enough to drag it some way down the river before it broke. It was, however, at last discovered and secured, and the catch was of sufficient magnitude to ensure a supply of fish, notwithstanding the logs.

“Stop a minute,” said the Captain, as the boats’ heads were put up the stream on their return; “we have not got all the långref yet, I am sure; I see another fish; just pull across that ripple, Parson, a few yards below the end of that stranded log. Yes, to be sure it is, and a salmon, too, and as dead as Harry the Eighth. Steady there! hold water!” and he made a rake for the line with his boat-hook. “Why, what have we got here? it is much too fine for the långref. As I live, it is your own line. To be sure; here it runs. Steady! Let me get a hold of it with my hand, it may not be hitched in the wood firmly, and if it slips we shall lose it entirely. That will do: all right. That must be the log that broke you; it must have stranded here after coming down the Aal Foss, with the fish still on it—and—hurrah! here is the fish all safe—and, I say, Parson, remarkably fine fish it is, certainly! not quite twenty-five pounds, though,”—holding up the fish by the tail, and measuring it against his own leg; for his trousers were marked with inches, from the pocket-button downwards,—a yard measure having been stitched on the seam. “You have not such a thing as a steelyard, have you?”

The Parson, laughing—rather confusedly, though,—produced from his slip pocket the required instrument.

“Ah! I thought so, ten pounds and a half; the biggest fish always do get away, that is certain, especially if they are not caught again; it is a thousand pities I put my eye on this one. I have spoilt your story?”

“Well, well,” said the Parson, “if you have spoilt my story, you have made a good one for yourself, so take the other oar and let us pull for the camp.”

“Birger,” said the Captain, when the boats had been made fast, and the spoils left in the charge of Piersen, “Torkel has been telling the Parson that we are to have three days of these logs. If the rascal speaks the truth, what is to be done by us fishermen?”

“The rascal does speak the truth in this instance, I will be bound for it,” said Birger; “he knows the river well, and besides, it is what they do on every river in Norway that is deep enough to float a baulk.”

“What is to be done, then? there is no fishing on the river while this is going on.”

“I will tell you what we can do,” said Birger; “two or three days ago—that day when I returned to the camp so late—if you remember, I told you that I had fallen in with a lonely lake in the course of my rambles. There was a boat there belonging to a sœter in the neighbourhood, which Piersen knew of, and I missed a beautiful chance at a flight of ducks. However, that is neither here nor there; the people at the sœter told me that the great lake-char was to be found there; so the next day I sent Piersen, who understands laying lines if he does not understand fly-fishing, to set some trimmers for them. I vote we shoot our way to the lake, look at these lines, get another crack at the ducks, and make our way to the Toftdahl (which, if the map is to be trusted, must be somewhere within reach), fish there for a day, shoot our way back again, and by that time the wooden flood will be over.”

“Bravo, Birger,” said the Captain, “a very promising plan, and here, in good time, comes Commissary-General Jacob with the supplies. I see his boat just over that point, entangled among a lump of logs. I vote we take him with us; no man makes such coffee. I have not had a cup worth drinking since you sent him down the river.”

“You cannot take the poor fellow a long march to-day,” said the Parson, considerately, “he has just been pulling up the stream from Christiansand.”

“He pull! is that all you know of Jacob? I will venture to say he has not pulled a stroke since he started; look at the rascal, how he lolls at his ease, with his legs over the hamper, while the men are half in the water, struggling their way through the obstacles.”

“I see the scamp,” said the Parson; “upon my word, he puts me in mind of what the nigger observed on landing in England; man work, horse work, ox work, everything work, pig the only gentleman; Jacob is the only gentleman in our expedition.”

“I admire that man,” said Birger; “that is the true practical philosophy, never to do anything for yourself if you can get other people to do it for you. But I think those fellows had better make haste about it. I have known such a hitch of timber as that bridge the whole river, from side to side, in ten minutes; they accumulate very rapidly when they once take ground—ah! there goes the boat free; all right; but I certainly began to tremble for my provisions.”

“Well, then, we will take gentleman Jacob,” said the Captain, “I cannot give up my coffee.”

“I think so,” said Birger; “we will leave our three boatmen here in charge of the camp; Tom, Torkel, and Piersen can carry the fishing-rods and our knapsacks, which we must pack in light marching order. Jacob shall provide for the kitchen, and we will each of us take a day’s provisions in our havresacs, and our guns on our shoulders; the odds are, we knock over grouse and wild fowl, by the way, enough to supply us nobly. And even if we do not meet with sport, we shall at all events have a pleasant pic-nicking trip, and see something of the country, while the Parson, who is so fond of open air, may indulge himself with sleeping under a tree, and contemplating the moon at his ease.”

Torkel, who had come up while they were watching Jacob’s progress, and had learnt their plans, informed them of a sœter which lay nearly in their proposed course, and in which he had himself often received hospitality.

“Well, then,” said the Captain, “that will do for us, and we will leave the Parson, if he prefers it,

“His hollow tree,

His crust of bread and liberty.”

“You may laugh,” said the Parson, “but the time will come when you will find out certain disagreeables in a Norwegian dwelling, which may make you think with less contempt on the hollow tree.”

“The Parson is of the same mind as the Douglas,” said the Captain, “he likes better to hear the lark sing, than the mouse squeak.”

“I like clean heather better than dirty sheep-skin,” said the Parson.

“And musquitoes better than fleas,” added the Captain.

“Bother the musquitoes: I did not think of them.”[18]

“They will soon remind you,” said Birger, “if we happen to encamp near standing water.” And he went on packing his knapsack to the tune of “Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot,” which he whistled with considerable taste and skill.[19]

Arrangements, such as these, are soon made; the three boatmen were left in charge of the camp, with full permission to get as drunk as they pleased; and, before Jacob had well stretched his legs, which had been cramped in the boat, he was stretching them on the mountain-side, marching a good way in the rear of the party, and grumbling as he marched.

The mountains, which, all the way from Christiansand, hem in the river, so that not even a goat can travel along its banks, at Mosse Eurd and Wigeland recede on both sides, forming a sort of basin; and here, in a great measure, they lose their abrupt and perpendicular character. Close by the water-side, there are a hundred, or two, of acres of inclosed ground comparatively flat, and either arable or meadow; not by any means in a ring fence, but spots cribbed here and there from the fjeld, which looks more like a gentleman’s park than anything else, with these little paddocks fenced out of it. The houses, too, are quite the picturesque houses that gentlemen in England ornament their estates with, so that the untidy plank fences seemed altogether out of character with the scenery. What one would look for here, is the neat park palings of England, or its trim quickset hedges.

Beyond this, the ground becomes more broken and wooded, but without losing its parkish character; it is something like the forest grounds of the South Downs in England, only broken into detached hills and deep rises, with, occasionally, a bare ridge of rock forcing its way through the short green turf. The forest was mostly birch, with a few maples and sycamores, and, here and there, a fir; but every tree big enough for a timber stick, had long ago been floated down to the boom at Christiansand. The character of the whole scene was prettiness rather than beauty. The mountains, however, were no lower than they had been further down the river; it was as if their perpendicular sides had, in some antediluvian age, given way, and that, in the course of centuries, the fragments had become covered with trees and verdure.

Among these broken pieces of mountain it was extremely easy for the traveller to lose his way; there was not the vestige of a path, that is to say, a path leading to any place to which he could possibly want to go. The grass was particularly good and sweet there, and sheep and cows are intensely conservative in their idiosyncracy; so stoutly had they kept up the principle of stare super antiquas vias, that the appearance was as if the whole region was thickly inhabited and intersected with foot-paths in every direction, while every animal that helps to make them rings its own individual bell, and carries its own individual brand, but pastures in uncontrolled liberty. A cow is a very good guide to a lost man, for, if he has patience to wait till evening, she is sure to feed her way to the sœter to be milked; but woe to the man who puts his trust in bullocks or in sheep; they feed at ease, and roam at pleasure, till the frosts and snows of approaching winter bring them home to the fold, the stall, and the salting-tub.

Much of the shrubbery appearance of the scene is produced by the numerous plants of the vaccinium tribe, the bright glossy leaves of which look like myrtle; and the blue aconite, and the gentian, and the lily of the valley, flowers which we seldom meet with in England, absolutely wild, and the familiar leaves of the raspberry, and black currant, suggest ideas of home, while the turf on which the traveller treads, looks as if it had been mown by the gardener that very morning.

The course, though varied by quite as many ups and downs as there were ins and outs, was, upon the whole, continually ascending; and, as the higher regions were attained, and the facilities of transport diminished, the tall stately fir began to assert its natural supremacy among the northern sylva. Still, however, there was enough of birch, and even of the softer woods, to diversify the foliage, and preserve the park-like aspect. Heather, of which the Parson had anticipated making his couch, there was none; but, on the other hand, there was no furze to irritate the shins, or brambles to tear the clothes. The latter does grow in Norway, and is much more prized for its fruit than either raspberry or strawberry, but the former cannot stand the winters. Linnæus is said to have sat for hours in delighted contemplation of an English field of furze in full bloom, and the plant is generally seen in Swedish conservatories to this day, or set out in pots as oranges and myrtles are with us.

The mid-day sun had scattered the clouds of the morning, as, in truth, it very generally does on a Norway summer day, and, shining down in patches of brilliant light through the openings, added to the beauty of the scene, and diminished in an equal proportion all regrets at leaving the Torjedahl behind; for it was quite evident that, except in the Hell Fall, or the pools, little or nothing could be done on so bright a day, had the baulks been entirely out of the question.

It was an hour or two past noon when they arrived at the ridge which divides the valley of the Torjedahl from that of the Aalfjer—not that ridge is the proper expression, for the ground had, for some miles, become so nearly level that, were it not for a little rill, whose line of rushes had been for some time their guide, they would not have known whether they were ascending or descending. The country still preserved its character of beauty, but its features had gradually become more tame, so that the inequalities which, in the beginning of their journey had looked like fragments of mountains, were now rounded and regular, like so many gigantic mole-hills.

Between two of these, the turf of which was green and unbroken to the summit, and shorter and more velvety, if that were possible, than any they had passed over, was the source of the rill, a black, boggy, rushy, uninviting bit of ground, but covered with myrica bushes, which diffused through the still air their peculiarly aromatic and refreshing scent; in the centre of this was a deep still hole—it could be called nothing else—it certainly was not a spring head, for there was not a bubble of springing water; it was perfectly still and motionless, and looked absolutely black in its clearness.

It was a welcome halt to all, for the sun was hot and the way was long. The well-head was a noted haunt of the dwarfs or Trolls, indeed it was said to penetrate to the centre of the earth, and to be the passage through which they emerged to upper air.

This was the reason why, though everything around was scorching and dropping in the withering heat, and though the unshaded sun fell full upon the unprotected surface, the water was at all times very cold, and yet in the hardest winter no ice ever formed upon it—its cold was that of the well of Urdar which waters the roots of Yggdrassil, the tree of life; no frost can bind these waters, neither can they be polluted with leaves or sticks, for a dwarf sits continually on guard there, to keep open the passage for his brethren.

“Well,” said Birger, “I can readily believe that these are the waters of life, I never met with anything so refreshing, it beats all the brandy in the universe.”

Jacob put in no protest to this heresy, but expressed a practical dissent by applying his mouth to a private bottle and passing it to Tom.

The Captain was proceeding to wash his face and hands in the well-head, but the men begged him not to pollute it; the rill below, they said, did not so much signify.

The place had been noted by Birger for a halt, and right glad were they all to disembarrass themselves of their respective loads, and to stretch themselves in various attitudes of repose picturesque enough upon the whole, under the great white poplars whose restless leaves fluttered over head though no one could feel the breeze that stirred them, and shaded the fairy precincts of the haunted well.

The Parson threw himself on his back upon the turf with his jacket, waistcoat, and shirt-collar wide open, his arms extended, and his neckerchief, which he had removed, spread over his face and bare neck to keep off the musquitoes. He was not asleep exactly, nor, strictly speaking, could it be said that he was awake; he was enjoying that quiet dreamy sort of repose, that a man thoroughly appreciates after walking for five or six hours on a burning hot summer’s day. His blood was still galloping through his veins, and he was listening to the beat of his own pulses.

“This is very delightful, very,” he said, in a drowsy drawling voice, speaking rather to himself than to Torkel. “A very curious sound, one, two, three, it sounds like distant hammers.”

“Oh, the Thousand!” said Torkel, “where are we lying?”

The Parson, when he threw himself down on the hill side, had been a great deal too hot and tired to pay much attention to his couch, beyond the evident fact that the turf was very green and inviting, and that it contained no young juniper or other uncomfortable bedding: roused by Torkel’s observation, he sat upright, and seeing nothing very remarkable except a good rood of lilies of the valley at his feet, the scent of which he had been unconsciously enjoying, and which did not look at all terrible, stared at him. “Well,” said he, “what is the matter? where should we be lying?”

“I do not know,” said Torkel, “that is, I do not know for certain; but did you not say you heard hammers? Stay,” he said, looking as if he had resolved to do some desperate deed—“yes, I will, I am determined,” and he took a piece of clay that was sticking on his right boot, and having patted it into the size of a half-crown, put it on his head and dashed his hat on over it. Then shading his eyes with his hand, he looked fixedly at the hill, as if he were trying to look through it. “No,” said he, “I do not see anything, I hope and trust you are mistaken.”

“What can you be about?” said the Parson impatiently, “have you found a brandy shop in the forest?”

“I thought it must be the Bjergfolk,” he said, “when you heard the hammers. I never can hear them myself, because I was not born on a Saturday, and I thought perhaps you might have been. It is a very round hill too, just the sort of place they would choose, and they have not a great deal of choice nowadays, there are so many bells in the churches, and the Trolls cannot live within the sound of bells.”

“No?” said the Parson, “why not?”

“None of the spirits of the middle earth like bells,” said Torkel, “neither Alfs, nor Nisses, nor Nechs, nor Trolls, they do not like to think of man’s salvation. Bells call people to church, and that is where neither Troll nor Alf may go. They are sometimes very spiteful about it, too.”

“In the good old times, when it was Norway and Denmark, and we were not tied to those hogs of Swedes as we are now” (sinking his voice, out of respect to Birger, but by no means so much so that Birger could not hear him), “they were building a church at Knud. They pitched upon a highish mound near the river, on which to build it, because they wanted the people to see their new church, little thinking that the mound was the house of a Troll, and that on St. John’s eve, it would stand open supported on real pillars. Well, the Troll, who must have been very young and green, could not make out what they were going to do with his hill, and he had no objection whatever to a house being built upon it, because he reckoned upon a good supply of gröd and milk from the dairy. He could have seen but very little of the world above the turf not to know a church from a house. However, he had no suspicions, and the bells were put up, and the Pröbst came to consecrate. The poor Troll could not bear to see it, so he rushed out into the wide world, and left his goods and his gold and his silver behind him.

“The next day a peasant going home from the consecration saw him weeping and wringing his hands beyond the hearing of the bells, which was as near as he could venture to come. And the Troll told him that he was obliged to leave his country, and could never come back, and asked him to take a letter to his friends.

“I suppose the man’s senses were rather muzzy yet—he could hardly have had time to get sober so soon after the ceremony; but somehow or another he did not see that the speaker was a Troll, but took him for some poor fellow who had had a misfortune, and had killed some one, and fancied he was afraid of the Landamptman, particularly as he had told him not to give the letter to any one (indeed it had no direction), but to leave it in the churchyard of the new church, where the owner would find it.

“One would naturally wish to befriend a poor fellow in such a strait; so the man took the letter, put it into his pocket, and turned back.

“He had not gone far before he felt hungry, so he took out a bit of flad bröd and some dried cod that he had put into his pocket. They were all wet. He did not know how that could be; but he took out the letter for fear it should be spoiled, and then found that there was wet oozing out from under the seal. He wiped it; but the more he wiped it, the wetter it was. At last, in rubbing, he broke the seal, and he was glad enough to run for it then, for the water came roaring out of the letter like the Wigelands Foss, and all he could do he could only just keep before it till it had filled up the valley. And there it is to this day. I have seen it myself—a large lake as big as our Forres Vand. The fact was, the Troll had packed up a lake in the letter, and would have drowned church, bells, and all, if he had only sealed it up a little more carefully.”

“Well,” said the Parson, “this beats our penny-post; we send queer things by that ourselves, but I do not think anybody has ever yet thought of sending a lake through the General Post Office.”

“Is there not some story about Hercules cleaning out the Admiralty, or some such place, in a very similar way?” said the Captain.

“No,” said the Parson, “I never heard that the Admiralty has ever been cleaned out at all since the days of Pepys. If ever it is done, though, it must be in some such wholesale way as this—I do not know anything else that will do it.”

“The hill-men are not such bad fellows, though,” said Tom, on whom all this by-play about the Admiralty was quite lost, British seaman as he was; “and, by the way, Torkel, I wish you would not call them by their names, you know they do not like it, and may very well do us a mischief before we get clear of this fjeld. Many people say that there is no certainty of their being damned after all—our schoolmaster thinks they certainly will not, for he says he cannot find anything about damning Trolls in the Bible, and I am sure I hope it will not be found necessary to damn them, for they often do us a good turn. There was a Huusbonde in the Tellemark who had one of their hills on his farm that no one had ever made any use of, and he made up his mind to speak to the Troll about it. So he waited till St. John’s eve came round and the hill was open, and then he went, and sure enough he found the Bjergman. He seemed a good-humoured fellow enough, but he was not so rich as most of them; he had only a very few copper vessels in his hill and hardly any silver.

“‘Herr Bjergman,’ said the Huusbonde, ‘you do not seem to be in a very good case, neither am I, but I think we may make something of this hill of yours between us—I say between us, for, you know, the top of the soil belongs to me, just as the under soil belongs to you.’

“‘Aye, aye!’ said the Bjergman, ‘I should like that very well. What do you propose?’

“‘Why, I propose to dig it up and sow it, and as we have both of us a right to the ground, I think in common fairness we ought both of us to labour at it, and then we will take the produce year and year about. The first year I will have all that is above ground and you shall have all below; and the next year we will change over, and then you shall have all that is above and I will have all that is below.”

“‘Well,’ said the Troll, greatly pleased, ‘that is fair; I like dealing with an honest man. When shall we begin?’

“‘Why, next spring, I think; suppose we say after Walpurgis night,[20] we cannot get at the ground much before.’

“‘With all my heart,’ said the Bjergman—and so they did. They worked very well together, but the Bjergman did twice as much work as his friend; they always do when they are pleased; and they sowed oats and rye and bear; and when harvest came the Huusbonde took that which was above the ground, the grain and the straw which came to his share, while the Bjergman was very well contented with his share of roots.

“‘When next Walpurgis night came round they dug up the ground again; and this time the Bjergman was to have all that was above ground, so they manured it well, and sowed turnips and carrots; and by and by, when the harvest came, the Huusbonde had a fine heap of roots, and the Bjergman was delighted with his share of greens. There never came any harm of this that I know, each was pleased with his bargain, and the Huusbonde came to be the richest man in the Tellemark. You know the family, Torkel, old Nils of Bygland, it was his grandfather Lars, to whom it happened.”

“Well,” said Torkel, “it is quite true, then, I can testify, I only wish I had a tenth part so many specie-dalers in the Trondhjem Bank as old Nils has.”

“And our Norfolk squires,” said the Captain, “fancy it was their sagacity that discovered the four-course system of agriculture! The Trolls were before them, it seems.”

“The system seems to answer quite as well in Norway as ever it did in England,” said the Parson, “If all that Tom tells us about Nils of Bygland be true.”

“There is not a doubt of that,” said Torkel, “all Tellemarken knows Nils of Bygland, and it is a great pity, when we were crossing the lake the other day, that we did not stop at his house; he was never known to let a stranger go to bed sober yet.”

“I should think he was seldom without company, then,” said Birger.

“It seems to have answered very well in this particular case,” said Jacob, “but I do not think you can trust beings without souls, after all. It is best just to make your offering to Nyssen, and to the Lady of the Lake, and two or three others, and then to have nothing more to do with them.”

“You certainly had better keep a sharp look-out,” said Torkel, “But I think we Norwegians know how to handle them, and so do our gallant friends the Danes. Did you ever hear how Kallendborg Church was built?”

The Englishmen, at all events, had not, and Torkel went on.

“Esberne Snorre was building that church, and his means began to run short, when a Troll came up to him and offered to finish it off himself, upon one condition, and that was, that if Snorre could not find out his name he should forfeit his heart and his eyes.

“Snorre was very anxious to finish his church, and he consented, though he was not without misgivings either; and the Troll set about his work in earnest. Kallendborg Church is the finest church in the whole country, and the roof of its nave was to stand on four pillars, for the Troll drew out the plan himself. It was all finished except half a pillar, and poor Snorre was in a great fright about his heart and his eyes, when one evening as he came home late from the market at Roeskilde he heard a Troll woman singing under a hill—

“Tie stille, barn min,

Imorgen kommer Fin

Fa’er din,

Og gi’er dig Esberne Snorre’s öine og hjerte at lege mid.”[21]

“Snorre said nothing; but the next morning out he goes to his church, and there he meets the Troll bringing in the last half pillar.

“‘Good morning, my friend Fin,’ said he, ‘you have got a heavy weight to carry.’

“The Troll stopped, looking at him fiercely, gnashed his teeth, stamped on the ground for rage, flew off with the half pillar he was carrying; and so Snorre built his church and kept his heart and eyes.”

“Do not believe a word of that,” said Jacob, “there is not a word of truth in the story; and as for Esberne Snorre building a church, everybody knows he was no better than he should be at any time of his life.[22] He was not the man to build a church, much less to give his eyes for it.”

“It is true,” said Torkel, “I have been at Kallendborg Church myself; and have seen the half pillar with my own eyes. The roof of the nave stands on three pillars and a half to this day.”

“More shame to the Kallendborgers, who never had religion enough to finish it,” said Jacob, “nor ever will. Do you mean to deny that the Devil carried off Esberne Snorre bodily? I think all the world knows that pretty well.”

“That shows that he thought him worth the trouble of carrying,” said Torkel, “he would never put himself out about carrying off you, because he knows you will go to him of your own accord.”

“Come, come, Torkel,” said the Parson, “do not be personal, and take your fingers off your knife handle; we cannot spare our cook yet, and you seem to like Jacob’s gröd yourself, too, judging by the quantity you eat of it; and now, Jacob, do not grind your teeth, but let us hear why you do not believe Torkel’s story, which certainly is very circumstantial, not to say probable.”

“Because every one knows that it was Lund Cathedral that was built by the Trolls, at the desire of the blessed Saint Laurentius,” said Jacob; “it was he who promised his eyes for it, and had them preserved by a miracle, not by a trumpery trick. Esberne Snorre, indeed; or any Dane, for matter of that! A set of infidels! It is only a Swede who would give his eyes for the church.”

“I should like to know who Scånia belonged to at the time when Lund Cathedral was built,” said Tom, “I do not think it was to the Swedes; and I should like to know who took away its archbishopric when they did get it, and made the great metropolis of all Scandinavia a trumpery little bishopric under the see of Upsala?”

“And I should like to know,” said Torkel, “who made bishops ride upon asses, and drink ‘du’ with the hangman. The Swedes give their eyes for the church, indeed! That for the Swedes!” snapping his fingers, and spitting on the ground.

This was a poser. Jacob was not only in the minority, but clearly wrong in matter of fact. At the dissolution of the union of Kalmar, Scånia, though situated in Sweden, was a Danish province, and its archbishop was, as he always had been, the metropolitan.

At the present time it is quite true that Scånia is a Swedish province; but this is a comparatively modern arrangement. In the days when the cathedral was built, though geographically a portion of Sweden, it was politically a province of Denmark; nor was it till its union with the former state that its capital, Lund, was deprived of its ecclesiastical primacy. And the treacherous conduct of Gustavus Vasa towards Canute, Archbishop of Upsala, and Peter, Bishop of Westeras, and the contumelies to which they were exposed, previous to their most unjust execution, are a blot even in that blood-stained reign, which Geijer himself, with all his ingenuity, cannot vindicate, and which the Norwegians, from whose protection the bishops were lured, are continually throwing in the teeth of their more powerful neighbours.

Birger himself was a little taken aback, not exactly liking that the weak points in his country’s history should be thus exposed to strangers.

“Never mind them, Jacob,” said he, forcing a laugh, “they are only Tellemarkers, and know no better. You and I shall see them, some of these days, climbing the trees of Goth’s garden themselves.”[23]

This bit of national slang, which fortunately was lost on the Norwegians, had the effect of soothing the ire of the sulky Jacob, who drew near to his countryman with a happy feeling of partisanship.

“The sooner the better,” said he, bitterly.

CHAPTER XI.
THE MOUNTAIN MARCH.

“Onward amid the copse ’gan peep,

A narrow inlet still and deep,

Affording scarce such breadth of brim

As served the wild duck’s brood to swim;

Lost for a space through thickets veering,

But broader when again appearing,—

Tall rocks and tufted knolls their face

Could in the dark-blue mirror trace;

And farther as the hunter strayed,

Still broader sweep its channels made.”

Lady of the Lake.

“How shall it be? Will you look your lay-lines to-day or to-morrow?” said the Parson, who, though not a little amused at the tilting between the rival champions, and by the manner in which Birger had suffered himself to be drawn into the squabble, began to think it had gone quite far enough for the future peace and unanimity of the expedition. “Come, Jacob, shoulder your knapsack, and march like a sensible Swede.”

“There never was but one sensible Swede,” said Torkel, in a grumbling aside, “and that was Queen Kerstin, when she jumped over the boundary, and thanked God that Sweden could not jump after her.”[24]

Jacob had sense enough not to hear this laudatory remark on his late sovereign’s discrimination, but, with his ordinary phlegm, resumed his load and his place in the line of march.

“By the way,” said the Parson, as they resumed their journey, “what was it, Torkel, that made you scrape the mud from your right foot and put it on your head in that insane manner, just now?”

“I can answer that,” said Birger; “you know that the whole tribe of Alfs, white, brown, and black, and the Trolls, and in fact the whole class that go under the generic name of Bjerg-folk, or Hill-men, live under the earth. To see them, therefore, on ordinary occasions, you must put yourself—at least, typically—in a similar condition. That upon which you have trod must cover your head; and you take it from the right foot rather than the left, partly as being more lucky, and partly because the left being a mark of disrespect, would incense the dwarfs, who would be sure to make you pay for it sooner or later; in fact they are a dangerous race to meddle with at all, they take offence so very easily. I believe, however, this is the safest plan, for they are not aware, unless you betray yourself, that the veil is removed from your sight. Did you never hear the story of the Ferryman of Sund?”

The Englishman, of course, had not heard it, neither had any of the men, for the legend is Danish and local; and though anything Danish is much better known in Norway than stories or legends relating to Sweden, it so happened that it was new to them all, and they closed up to listen to it.

“One evening, between the two lights,[25] a strange man came to the ferry at Sund and engaged all the boats: no sooner had the bargain been made, than they began to sink deeper and deeper into the water, as if some heavy cargo had been put into them, though the astonished boatmen could see nothing, and the boats looked quite empty.

“‘Shove off,’ said the stranger, ‘you have got quite load enough for one trip;’ and so they had, for the gunwales were not a couple of inches from the water, and the boats pulled so heavily, that it was as much as the men could do to get to the Vandsyssel side; if the water had not been wonderfully calm, they could not have done it at all—but it was calm; and all under the wake of the moon it looked as if it was covered with a network of silver filigree, to chain down the ripples.

“As soon as the boats touched the Vandsyssel shore, they began rising in the water again, as if their freight had been taken out of them, and then the stranger sent them back again; and so it went on throughout the whole night, and very hard work the ferrymen had, bringing over cargoes of emptiness.

“Then the day began to break, and the eastern sky to whiten; and just as the coming sun shot up his seven lances to show the world that King Day was at hand, the stranger, who had arranged all this, paid the ferrymen, not counting the coins, but filling their hats with them with both hands, as a boy shovels out his nuts.

“‘What had they been bringing over?’ asked one of them. ‘Cannot you be quiet, and know when you are well off,’ said the stranger; ‘you need not be afraid of the custom-house dues; they will have sharp eyes to see anything contraband in what you have carried over last night; put your money in your pockets and be thankful—you will not earn so much in the next three years.’

“But in the mean while one of the ferrymen, a sharper fellow than his neighbours, jumped on shore, and did just exactly what Torkel did just now—put a piece of clay from the sole of his shoe on the crown of his head. His eyes were opened at once; all the sandhills about Aalberg were alive with little people, every one of them carrying on his back gold and silver pots, and jugs, and vessels of every description—the whole place looked like one gigantic anthill.

“‘O-ho,’ said he, ‘that’s what you are about; well, joy go with you, we shall not be plagued with you any more on our side of the water; that’s one good job, anyhow.’

“But it was not a good job for him; it is very possible to be too sharp for one’s own good. All his gold money turned to yellow queens,[26] and his silver money to chipped oyster-shells, and he never got rich, or anything more than a poor ferryman of Sund, while his companions had their hats full of ancient Danish gold and silver coins, and bought ships of their own, and went trading to Holland and the free towns, and became great men.”

“Upon my word, Torkel,” said the Parson, “you are too venturesome; it is just as well that there were no Trolls to be seen just now at the well; but you must not try it again, or you will never become a great man, or command a ship—not that this would suit you very well, I suppose.”

“Torkel would undertake the command of the Haabet, just now, I’ll engage, little as he knows about seamanship, if he could only get young Svensen out of her,” said Mr Tom, with a knowing grin; to which innuendo, whatever it might mean, Torkel playfully replied by kicking out behind at him with one foot, after the manner of a donkey. He missed Tom, however, to his and Piersen’s intense mirth; but what was the precise nature of the joke, there was now no opportunity of explaining, as the descent had become so steep that the assistance of the hand was necessary, in order to keep their footing.

At a few hundred yards from the dwarf’s well, they had fallen in with a little streamlet, running eastward, on a pretty rapid descent, even from the first, but which now began to form a series of diminutive cascades, leaping in so many spouts from rock to rock, while the ground, over which it ran, seemed as if it was fast changing from the horizontal to the perpendicular; indeed, had there not been plenty of rocks jutting out, and a good crop of twisted and gnarled trunks and roots, many portions of the journey might have been accomplished with more speed than pleasure.