272 
LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. 
can be observed; even then the disturbance does not 
amount to much more than a rather troublesome race. 
“ Often and often, when she was a girl, had his wife 
and her sisters sailed over its fabulous crater in an 
open boat.” But in this wild romantic country, with 
its sparse population, rugged mountains, and gloomy 
fiords, very ordinary matters become invested with a 
character of awe and mystery quite foreign to the 
atmosphere of our own matter-of-fact world; and 
many of the Norwegians are as prone to superstition 
as the poor little Lapp pagans who dwell among 
them. 
No later than a few years ago, in the very fiord we 
had passed on our way to Alten, when an unfortunate 
boat got cast away during the night on some rocks at 
a little distance from the shore, the inhabitants, startled 
by the cries of distress which reached them in the 
morning twilight, hurried down in a body to the sea¬ 
side,—-not to afford assistance,—but to open a volley of 
musketry on the drowning mariners; being fully per¬ 
suaded that the stranded boat, with its torn sails, was no 
other than the Kracken, or Great Sea-Serpent, flapping 
its dusky wings: and when, at last, one of the crew 
