-don't know!" I certainly
did not suspect him of knowing much, but thought that question at
least would not be beyond the limits of his intelligence. Finding him
insensible to the approaches of humanity, I revenged myself for his
rudeness by making a sketch of his person, which I hope will be
recognized by his friends in England should he meet with any
misfortune in the wilds of Norway. They will at least know where to
search for his body, and be enabled to recognize it when they find it.
This man's sense of enjoyment reminded me of the anecdote told by
Longfellow in Hyperion, of an Englishman who sat in a tub of cold
water every morning while he ate his breakfast and read the
newspapers.

[Illustration: PLAYING HIM OUT.]

I met with many such in the course of my tour. Is it not a little
marvelous what hardships people will encounter for pleasure? Here was
a man of mature age, in the enjoyment perhaps of a comfortable
income, who had left his country, with all its attractions, for a
dreary desert in which he was utterly isolated from the world. He was
not traveling--not reading, not surrounded by a few congenial friends
who could make a brief exile pleasant, but utterly alone; ignorant, no
doubt, of the language spoken by the few shepherds in the
neighborhood; up to his knees in a pool of cold water; stubbornly
striving against the most adverse circumstances of wind and weather to
torture out of the water a few miserable little fish! Of what material
can such a man's brain be composed, if he be gifted with brain at all?
Is it mud, clay, or water; or is it all a bog? Possibly he was a lover
of nature; but if you examine his portrait you will perceive that
there is nothing in his personal appearance to warrant that suspicion.
Even if such were the case, this was not the charming region described
by the quaint old Walton, where the scholar can turn aside "toward the
high honeysuckle hedge," or "sit and sing while the shower falls upon
the teeming earth, viewing the silver streams glide silently toward
their centre, the tempestuous sea," beguiled by the harmless lambs
till, with a soul possessed with content, he feels "lifted above the
earth." Nor was the solitary angler of the Dovre Fjeld a man likely to
be lifted from the earth by any thing so fragile as the beauties of
nature. His weight--sixteen stone at least--would be much more likely
to sink him into it.

As I approached the neighborhood of Djerkin on the Dovre