that you keep in a glass-bowl, just as you keep a
canary in a cage: but then they are from another fairyland in the
south.

When a Nordlander speaks of birds he does not mean as they do here, only
a head or two of game, but an aerial throng of winged creatures,
rippling through the sky, flying round the rocks, like white foam, or
descending like a snowstorm on their nesting-places; he thinks of
eider-duck, guillemot, diver and oyster-catcher swimming in fjord and
sound, or sitting upon the rocks; of gulls, ospreys and eagles, hunting
in the air; of the eagle-owl, hooting weirdly at night in the
mountain-clefts--in short, he means a whole world of birds, and has a
little difficulty in confining his ideas to the poor capercailzie,
surprised and killed by a sportsman in the midst of a love-frolic, when
the sun is rising over the pine-clad hills.

Instead of the fruit-gardens here, he has the miles of cloudberry moors
at home. Instead of a poor, uniform shore with nothing but mussels, he
remembers a grand beach strewn with myriads of marvellously tinted
shells.

All natural conditions are intensified in Nordland, and are far more
powerfully contrasted than in the south of Norway. Nordland is a
boundless stone-grey waste, as it was in primaeval times before man began
to build, but in the midst of this there are also countless natural
treasures; it has a sun and a summer glory, whose day is not twelve
hours only, but an uninterrupted period of three months, during which,
in many places, one must wear a mask as protection against the swarms of
mosquitoes; but, on the other hand, the night is a time of darkness and
horror, lasting nine months. Everything there is on a gigantic scale
without the gradual transitions between extremes, upon which the quiet
life here in the south is built; in other words, there are more
occasions for fancy, adventure and chance, than for calm reasoning, and
quiet activity with certain results.

A Nordlander, therefore, down here, is at first apt to feel like
Gulliver, who has come to Lilliput, and, on the whole, does not get on
well among the inhabitants, until he has screwed down his old customary
ideas to the simple proportions of their insignificant life; in short,
until he has taught himself to use his intellect, instead of his fancy.

The Lap on snow-shoes with his reindeer, the Fin, the Russian, not to
mention the constantly moving Nordlander himself, who, though slow on
land, is quick i