i;o LINES IN PLEASANT PLACES 



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 ex- 

 perience, and the daughters taking their share in the 

 rod-work performed. The house is a type of the Nor- 

 wegian 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 cul- 

 tured 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 pre- 

 viously she has slain a 28-lb. salmon, after two hours' 

 battle, with a I5~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 



