THE WALRUS. 
389 
day in Ullapool Bay, when he tried to command his 
feelings sufficiently to acquaint me with the creature’s 
death, which, he announced in this graphic sentence, 
“ Ah, my Lord ! the poor thing !—toes up at last! ” 
Bergen is not as neat and orderly in its architectural 
arrangements as Drontheim; a great part of the city is 
a confused network of narrow streets and alleys, much 
resembling, I should think, its early inconveniences, in 
the days of Olaf Kyrre. This close and stiffing system 
of street building must have ensured fatal odds against 
the chances of life in some of those world-devastating 
plagues that characterised past ages. Bergen was, in 
fact, nearly depopulated by that terrible pestilence 
which, in 1349, ravaged the North of Europe, and whose 
memory is still preserved under the name of “ The 
Black Death.” 
I have been tempted to enclose you a sort of ballad, 
which was composed while looking on the very scene 
of this disastrous event; its only merit consists in its 
local inspiration, and in its conveying a true relation 
of the manner in which the plague entered the doomed 
city. 
