BERGEN. 
387 
encourage his boarding us on such an errand; or per¬ 
haps it was the old marauding, toll-taking spirit coming 
out strong in him: the politer influences of the nine¬ 
teenth century toning down the ancient Viking into a 
sort of a cross between Paul Jones and Jeremy Diddler; 
only instead of with a galley, it was with his telescope 
he now swept the high seas;—nevertheless, he seems to 
have had as great an eye to the main chance as any of 
his ancestors. 
Bergen, with its pale-faced houses grouped on the 
brink of the fiord, like invalids at a German spa, 
though picturesque in its way, with a cathedral of its 
own, and plenty of churches, looked rather tame and 
spiritless after the warmer colouring of Throndhjem ; 
moreover it wanted novelty to me, as I called in 
there two years ago on my return from the Baltic. 
It was at Bergen that I became possessed of my 
ever-to-be-lamented infant Walrus. 
No one, personally unacquainted with that “ most 
delicate monster,” can have any idea of his attaching 
qualities. I own that his figure was not strictly 
symmetrical, that he had a roll in his gait, suggestive 
of heavy seas, that he would not have looked well in 
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