SUMMER RAMBLES ON THE SURENDAL FJELDS. 113 
It was 1 a.m. when we landed, the clouds in the 
north already beginning to regain some of the rosy 
tints they had only lost two hours before. Yet the 
willow-wrens, redwing, and cuckoo were all singing, and 
the weird laughter of the big divers resounded across 
the loch. We observed a dipper feeding its young 
at the inflow of a small torrent hard by where we 
beached our boat. Blackcocks had been “ crooning ” 
at 11 p.m., and by two o’clock the willow-grouse began 
to cackle. 
We had a four hours’ tramp homewards, and, looking 
back from the highest ridge, enjoyed a lovely alpine 
scene. Far away to north and west the serrated snow- 
peaks of the Dovre-fjeld towered high above intervening 
strata of woolly white clouds, which hid our loch and 
all the middle distance, while the foreground was super¬ 
latively wild and chaotic. 
When halfway home, I proposed a rest, and Ivar, 
looking widely around over a prospect of some hundreds 
of miles of open fell and snowfield, blandly remarked, 
“Ja, ja, very plenty place.” The contrast seemed 
absurd, but Ivar’s English was often amusing, and the 
words “ very plenty ” comprised a large portion of his 
vocabulary. The opposite meanings of the Norsk 
“ noget ” and our “ nothing ” probably explain the 
exuberant glee with which, on a lovely fishing morning, 
my jiclus Achates would invariably remark, “ To-day 
I hope we may get nothing ! ” 
At three o’clock a common brown hare was feeding 
in the dewy pastures that overlooked our valley, and 
a couple of hours later we were back on the river 
haughs, where hundreds of fieldfares fed noisily in the 
I 
