CHAPTER VII 



NORWAY IN 1865. MY FIRST SALMON 



NEARLY fifty years have passed since my first visit to 

 Norway, where I spent a memorable holiday in 1865 ; 

 memorable indeed ! for then I caught my first salmon. 

 I had always been a fisherman from that first day 

 when, at the age of five or thereabouts, I extracted 

 goldfish with a crooked pin baited with bread from 

 the pond of tepid water which adjoins the Low Moor 

 ironworks. Dace, gudgeon, and perch were my next 

 victims, then small jack, and before I was seven, when 

 on a visit with my parents to the Wrights at 

 Halston, I caught a trout some three inches long in 

 the stream which flows beside the beautiful lake across 

 which the famous Jack Mytton, a later William Tell, 

 had fired and cut the red feather out of his mother's 

 bonnet with a rifle ball. The mark tempted him. 

 " Look out, mother," he cried, and fired, fortunately 

 with a true aim. The incident was told me by my 

 father, who records also among his earliest recollections 

 of Shrewsbury, where he was at school, how he was 

 privileged to behold that hero engaged in the character- 

 istic diversion of making an unfortunate waiter dance 

 by flicking his white cotton calves with a long driving- 

 whip. Now the rest of the acts of Jack Mytton and 

 all that he did, how he dissipated a fine fortune, and 

 ruined an iron constitution, are they not written and 



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