XIII.] THE WALRUS. 241 



gentleman certainly came into the category of men " who 

 do business in great waters," his business being to negotiate 

 a loan ; in short, to ask me to lend him 100/. There must 

 have been something very innocent and confiding in " the 

 cut of our jib " to encourage his boarding us on such an 

 errand \ or perhaps it was the old marauding, toll-taking 

 spirit coming out strong in him : the politer influences 

 of the nineteenth century toning down the ancient Viking 

 into a sort of a cross between Paul Jones and Jeremy 

 Diddler. The seas which his ancestors once swept with 

 their galleys, he now sweeps with his telescope, and with as 

 keen an eye to the main chance as any of his predecessors 

 displayed. The feet-washing ceremony was evidently a 

 propitiatory homage to the purity of my quarter-deck. 



Bergen, with its pale-faced houses grouped on the brink 

 of the fiord, like invalids at a German Spa, though pic- 

 turesque in its way, with a cathedral of its own, and plenty of 

 churches, looked rather tame and spiritless after the warmer 

 colouring of Throndhjem ; moreover it wanted novelty to 

 me, as I called in there two years ago on my return from 

 the Baltic. It was on that occasion that I became possessed 

 of mv ever-to-be-lamented infant Walrus. 



J 



No one, personally unacquainted with that " most deli- 

 cate monster," can have any idea of his attaching qualities. 

 I own that his figure was not strictly symmetrical, that he 

 had a roll in his gait, suggestive of heavy seas, that he 

 would not have looked well in your boudoir ; but he never 

 seemed out of place on my quarter-deck, and every man on 

 board loved him as a brother. With what a languid grace 

 he would wallow and roll in the water, when we chucked 

 him overboard ; and paddle and splash, and make himself 

 thoroughly cool and comfortable, and then come and " beg 

 to be taken up," like a fat baby, and allow the rope to be 

 slipped round his extensive waist, and come up — sleek and 

 dripping— among us again with a contented grunt, as much 

 as to say, "Well, after all, there's no place like home T 

 How he would compose himself to placid slumber in every 



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