CHAPTEK III 



SEAFAKING 



Tlie Vikings 



The sight which we spoke of in the last chapter, of the 

 boats on festival days or Sundays making from the 

 lesser villages or from solitary farmhouses towards 

 some trysting-place, is an exceedingly beautiful one, and 

 is sussestive of much. It is curious to see how the 

 boats appear to start out of the precipitous walls of the 

 fjord, though they really come from some bay hidden 

 from sight. The place where you are standing is rock- 

 girt ; no other houses are visible but those of your own 

 village; behind you there stretches, may be, one road, 

 or perhaps only a mountain path towards the interior 

 of the country ; in front lies the fjord. You feel as if 

 you were standing at the end of the habitable earth, 

 cut off from communication with the rest of the world. 

 Then suddenly, one by one, these boats appear in sight, 

 as if they had risen up from the water, or, as we have 

 said, had sprung out of the rock itself. It is the water 

 of the fjord which constitutes the road, the connecting 

 link, between the farms and villages upon its banks, 

 the safest imaoinable wav, and the easiest traversed. 

 It is in this wise, by sights such as these, that we come 



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