WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 303 



English tabard. Ghost of Sir David Lindsay ! with only one 

 wee lion ; and in the second quartering ! 



Fancy the bear's contemplative pause after the address 

 of welcome and before it has decided what part it will 

 take in the ceremony. I must make a picture of this in 

 oils. 



Our Spanish comarados intended to take their bear to 

 Madrid, but they hear the temperature there has lately been 

 one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade, so they fear 

 it would melt, consequently they decide to build a large 

 iron enclosure across a small river which runs through their 

 estancia and the cork woods of their northern hills. There 

 was such a den or prison already in Spain, where I am told 

 the bear, also a polar bear, worked out an honourable old 

 age, fishing salmon and trout for the family of its owner. 

 It must be a pretty sight to see a white bear beside the 

 foam of a fall, waiting its time to clip out a silvery grilse 

 or salmon. 



The process of discharging a cargo of live polar bears is 

 fraught with considerable interest. If they escape their 

 captors' ropes and chains they go overboard, and as happened 

 here, two got loose and landed at the fish-market steps. 

 Tromso natives are accustomed to visits from all sorts and 

 kinds of people and beasts, Grand Dukes and Laps, walrus, 

 whales, and bears, but not bears at large. They fled, and the 

 bears tucked into the fish stalls, and the bill for their lunch 

 amounted to one hundred kroner (5, 10s.) probably any 

 other visitors might have bought all the fish in the market 

 that day for ten kroner. They fortunately took to the 

 water again after their meal, and were recaptured. Once 

 a walrus escaped at Tromso from board-ship, and it also 

 took to the water, and it was also recaptured ! It loved 

 the captain's wife and she whistled to it and it came 

 back. 



Our bears' cages, all tattered wood and iron bars, were 

 lifted, bears and all, by the winch over the side, and of 

 course sank almost to water-level. One of the iron bars 

 was levered up a little with a crowbar, which gave, in 

 Starboard's case, an opening for his delicate paw, which 



