opportunity, to them no doubt
a welcome chance, and pushed up to the higher reaches and even into the
lake. But this particular river can wait, as an excursion is arranged
for my first day to another river in a branch fiord, some eight miles
distant. A little local steamer picks us up at nine in the morning,
and my host, to whom I shall henceforth refer as G. P. F. (short for
Guide, Philosopher, and Friend), does not appear in his war paint. He
pretends that he wants an idle day, but he leaves his rod at home
simply that I may take the cream of what sport is going; hence, by and
by, when the owner of the river presses him to take his rod, he
laughingly declines, urging that he never likes to break other men's
tackle.

The wonderfully pure atmosphere deceives you so much in Norway as to
distances, that it is best to give up guessing. The fine summit of
dark mountain, mottled with snow, lying in the rear of the nearer
range, at the head of the charming little fiord up which we steer this
morning in water smooth as a mirror, and glaring in a bright sun, seems
to me for instance, entitled to, say, a rank of 2,000 ft.: but I learn
on landing that it is over 6,000 ft., and a notable sentinel on the
outskirts of a most notable glacier and snowfield. The shores of the
fiord are cultivated to an unusual distance up the mountain side, and
after the rain and mist of previous days, this grand landscape is my
real introduction to the characteristic scenery of the better kind of
Norwegian fiord. In truth it is all most beautiful.

The English gentleman who owns the river lives in a house near its
banks, and the ladies of his family are spending the season with him,
delighted with the experience, and the daughters taking their share in
the rod-work performed. The house is a type of the Norwegian fishing
quarters where life cannot be described as discomfort, much less
"roughing it." It is a pretty little villa, brightened by the refining
influences of cultured womanhood, and a summer inside its wooden walls
cannot surely be a hardship to anyone. One of the young ladies to whom
I am introduced is made to blush by the paternal statement that three
days previously she has slain a 28-lb. salmon, after two hours' battle,
with a 15-ft. grilse rod.

But a man in his waders, eager for action after months of piscatorial
abstinence, pants for the river and its chances. At present there are
none of the latter. The sun is bright upon