350 THE WILD-FOWLER. 



lacked the skill and courage necessary to incur the risk, the deceased 

 was adjudged to have been guilty of suicide, and was not allowed 

 a Christian burial, but treated as a criminal, who had, by means of 

 too hazardous fowling, been his own executioner. 



But Peter Clauson, in his Description of Norway, says there is 

 nothing done under that law at the present day.* 



* I once heard, from the pulpit, a beautiful allusion to this perilous system of 

 fowling, by a very learned divine, now one of her Majesty's Chaplains. He illus- 

 trated the subject of his text (taken from Pa. xc. 4, 5) by referring to an event 

 which had come to his knowledge, as to a fowler pursuing this hazardous occupation 

 suspended by a rope over a fearful precipice ; when, strand after strand of the rope 

 giving way, he at last hung between life and eternity by a single one. The 

 imagined feelings of the fowler at such a moment, and earnest preparation to meet 

 his God, were very impressively depicted by the worthy minister, in the subject of a 

 most eloquent discourse. 



