e, as far as we knew, might be in revolutionary
confusion: at Bergen, however, we hoped that letters were awaiting our
arrival.

Saturday the 17th of July, at midnight, we brought up off Bergen. It was
too late to pay much attention to any object; and after a careless view
of the town from deck, I went to bed.

The position of Bergen is similar to that of most of the other Norwegian
towns I had seen, girt on three sides with lofty, rocky mountains; and
on the fourth side by the blue waters of the Fiord. I looked on Bergen
with the liveliest interest, because its name was familiar to me when a
child, and I used to lisp the word before I could walk steadily; for in
those young days of waywardness my old schoolmistress, whose peaked nose
and malicious heart are still a vivid truth, would threaten to give me
to the fishermen at Bergen who, she said, would take and toss me into
the Maelstrom. With an eagerness akin to that of a schoolboy at
Christmas, gazing on the green curtain of a theatre, the moment it is
rising to disclose its wondrous entertainments, did I, travelling
headlong in memory from childhood to manhood and stumbling over a batch
of ancient feelings, stand looking, with strained eyes, on the
white-washed, quaint-fashioned Bergen, balancing the vicissitudes of
life and conjecturing what the chances might be, I should not, by some
agency as unaccountable as that which had brought me hither, be looking
in three months' time on the Golden shore of the Bight of Biaffir.

South-east of Bergen, twenty miles from the deck on which I stand,
blazing with dazzling splendour in the mid-day sun, the glaciers of
Folgefonde fall upon my sight; and raising its summit six thousand feet
to heaven, the stupendous range of mountain with its field of ice, forty
miles in length and twenty in breadth, braves with eternal snow the
tropic fury of this northern noon.

Surrounded as Bergen is by mountains of solid rock which, at a little
distance, appear completely black, some of the buildings painted green,
and others white, with their uniform roofs of red tiles, have a very
singular effect. The houses reared, with much order, on piles near the
water, are also neatly constructed of wood; and their bright colours
are not permitted to become tarnished by exposure to the weather, but
may contend with Holland in cleanliness and the freshness of their
paint. This first favourable glance from the deck of the yacht was not
altered when I