WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 301 



blazing black powder cartridges and splashing bullets at 

 three yards' range into the ice in front of a three-year-old 

 polar bear's nose, to turn it. It strikes me that the way 

 these fair-haired men stand, and move their heads, and 

 their type of face, is rather like the men of Berwickshire 

 or Selkirkshire. You could hardly tell a Selkirk man here 

 from a native, but the average man of Tromso is perhaps 

 smaller and thinner. 



The women here are not so well grown and good-looking 

 as those in Trondhjem. Half the men are teetotallers, at 

 least in public. I saw rather a remarkable sight here at 

 the table d'hote, six men at table in a row, "travellers," 

 I think, each with a large burgundy or claret glass full of 

 new milk beside his plate very dif- 

 ferent in habits and the appearance 

 we associate with their deep-drinking 

 Viking forefathers. It really does look 

 as if with milk drinking we may yet 

 have peace to be amongst all men. 



We go down the coast between the 

 islands in sunshine little cloudlets 

 round the greystone peaks in the 

 blue sky. This day is the Glorious 

 12th, and we are far from home 

 and we are more than content, to be 

 comfortably on shipboard, glad to 

 leave the northern ice regions, and 

 yet we know that in six months' time 

 we will long to return. We watch 

 the hills go past in luxurious repose from the luggage- 

 covered decks lovely hill-faces, wooded elk ground below, 

 and higher up, slopes, with scrub and heather, just the place 

 for dal ryper, the counterpart of our grouse, bar the white 

 flight feathers, and above, the heather-grey rocks and stones, 

 where you find the Norwegian ptarmigan ; a glorious country, 

 and so like our own. 



No wonder in the ancient days our forefathers exchanged 

 visits from these fiords to our Highland lochs and islands, 



