lemen standing or sitting, in large numbers,
in the churchyard, watching our manoeuvres with much interest. On the
brows of the headlands, the peasants, both men and women, viewed with
surprise our determination to put to sea on such an inauspicious day,
and in such stormy time; but when the cutter swung, so that the anchor
could be heaved, they could not refrain from loud expressions of praise
to see her gallant trim, and the pride of buoyancy with which she swam
the baffling waves.

At six o'clock in the evening, when we had stood out five or six miles
from the land, a calm fell; and when the sun declined, his disc,
expanded by the vapours of the mighty mountains at the mouth of the
Bukke Fiord, threw a gleam of golden light from peak to peak that,
glancing along the water, even came and danced upon our deck, and
dazzled the helmsman with its oblique light.

On Monday morning when I went on deck, I found that we had entered the
Bukke Fiord; and the same ravines, chasms, and cascades, identified the
sublimity of the scenery with that which I have already attributed to
the other Fiords. As we sailed along, the Fiord would expand into the
broad surface of a lake, and anon diminish to the narrow breadth of a
river hemmed in between two rocky banks. Smiling and still as a sleeping
child, and calmer than the watching mother, the water, undisturbed by a
breath of wind, lay without a ripple; and no cloud on the pure sky above
us intercepted the vertical rays of the sun, that descended with
intolerable heat; and, while panting beneath the piercing beams, we
turned towards the snow-clad mountains, and strove to bear the warmth by
looking on their glistening summits; but the tantalization was still
greater to see large patches of snow lying low down between the crevices
and deep glens, places where the sun had never shone, and to feel no
breath of cool air come to refresh us. Not a human habitation rose to
the sight, and no living creature, not even the gull, or smallest bird,
broke with its note the solemn stillness.

The pilot told us, that this Fiord had never been fathomed, and he
supposed it had no bottom. This was intelligence sufficiently
interesting to rouse all on board into activity; and a lead line of
eighty fathoms was nimbly brought on deck.

"I have heard say, my Lord," observed the sailing master to R----, "that
if a bottle be corked ever so tightly, and lowered to a certain depth in
the water, the water will